The Human Disaster of Unemployment

The number of unemployed people between ages 50 and 65 has more than doubled.

The prospects for the re-employment of older workers deteriorate sharply the longer they are unemployed. A worker between ages 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for 17 months has only about a 9 percent chance of finding a new job in the next three months. A worker who is 62 or older and in the same situation has only about a 6 percent chance. As unemployment increases in duration, these slim chances drop steadily.

The result is nothing short of a national emergency. Millions of workers have been disconnected from the work force, and possibly even from society. If they are not reconnected, the costs to them and to society will be grim.

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

PBS News Hour:
Unemployment: Addressing a Worsening 'Human Disaster' in U.S.

"I mean, it's really chilling. I think, in some ways, losing one's job is like having a death in the family. The statistics are -- really were shocking to us as we dug into them. The fact is that if somebody loses their job, then, in the year after their job, the probability of them dying is 50 to 100 percent higher.

Being separated from your job can take about a year-and-a-half off your expected life. And there are reasons for that. One is that the suicide rate is higher. Dean and I calculated that right now because of the higher long-term unemployment, it's probably the case there are about an extra 130 or so suicides a month, because of just the terrible stress that people go under when this happens.

Too many people, too many of us think of our job as our life. And so when you take the job away from someone, you can take away almost everything."