This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hoffman. This will just take a minute.

Losing your job is bad for you, but it could be good for the rest of us.

Because a study shows that a recession lowers

mortality in the population overall, even as the out-of-work individual's risk of death rises.

That paradoxical finding appears in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

It's easy to imagine that the stress of getting canned could pave the way to an untimely

demise, but can joblessness really improve societal survival? To find out,

researchers examined data from the U.S. Department of Labor and a 20-year survey of

so-called income dynamics, and they found that job losses linked to a 73 percent rise

in the probability of death for the newly unemployed, the equivalent of adding 10 years to his or her age.

At the same time, parsing the data state by state, the researchers found that people in general live longer during an economic downturn,

an extra year for each percentage point rise in unemployment.

One possible explanation, when the economy is strong, people commute more and sleep less, raising the risk of car crashes and

job-related injuries. Such accidents are less likely when folks are sitting on their

couches polishing up their resumes. Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkins.