When the economy gets into recession, people become anxious about their jobs, worried about not being able to get employed or having not enough money to finance their spending, so they get sick more easily. Right? Wrong! Fortune magazine ran a story that tells otherwise; in fact, it even surfaced the inverse relationship between death rates and unemployment rates!
Interestingly, people are actually working too much in most developed world today. Reducing work would make them healthier and perhaps allow them to live better lives though it might not satisfy all their wants. In any case, no amount of work would be able to satisfy all their wants in the first place. The implication of this is that there is actually an optimal income level for each person involved in a particular job. In a sense, an economy at any one time has an optimal national income so that the population is healthy (optimal health-productivity balance, long life expectancy and lower mortality).
(*corrected post)
Another article which attempts to construe correlation as casuality…
Correlation is NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER casuality.
Richard Feynmans’ infamous Cargo Cult Science speech – on good science v.s. bad science:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
The criticisms are particularly apt to the social sciences, even economics (e.g. Freakonomics, your typical journal papers…)