The Great Depression: What was the unemployment rate, death toll, and lasting impact?

Even the laziest of history students remembers the Great Depression. It’s the greatest global economic downturn of the modern era, after all, and in many ways we’re still feeling its impacts today.

History can be a harsh teacher, and the decade-long stretch of widespread suffering is among our most hard-won lessons. Several contributing factors landed the world in a spiraling economic situation, including tariffs and a stock market crash — sound familiar? — but it was what came after that really impacted people.

As banks were failing and tariffs were robbing American consumers of affordable goods, they were also facing widespread job loss and a massive surge in poverty. The impacts of the Great Depression reached far and wide, but it was America that often felt the heaviest weight, and that weight is pressing down once again.

How many people were unemployed during the Great Depression?

Unemployment skyrocketed during the decade-long Great Depression, which started in 1929 and stretched into 1939. Following the initial wave of economic disasters, businesses across the nation shuttered their doors, leaving millions jobless.

The height of the Great Depression hit in 1933, four years after the stock market crash, and it robbed nearly a quarter of the national work force of their income. A full 24.9% of American employees were out of work — that equals out to 12,830,000 people, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum — which pushed poverty to untenable levels.

Those who could find work faced struggles of their own, as they watched wages plummet by 42.5% between 1929 and 1933. The numbers feel particularly stark when compared to the recession of 2007-2009, which felt on-par with the Great Depression, but was actually much, much less devastating. Unemployment also saw a big dip in 2007 — dropping by 10%, right around half of those Great Depression numbers — and median family incomes declined by about 8%.

Do we know how many people died during the Great Depression?

The precise number of people who died during the Great Depression is exceedingly hard to pin down, thanks to a range of factors. Most importantly, the Great Depression had impacts across the globe, and many of its shockwaves didn’t hit until years later, making it challenging to directly attribute deaths to the economic downturn.

We do know that the Great Depression had a massively negative impact on public health, as people starved, froze, and neglected their health to save their homes. Suicides also saw a rise during the early 1930s, and the number of vagrant children exploded, but the overall number of deaths didn’t actually rise during the period.

Data gathered by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America shows that the only cause of death that saw an increase during the Great Depression was suicide, and even then it was relatively minor. Other causes of death, including disease and even vehicular accidents, didn’t seem to be impacted by the Depression much at all.

What are the lasting impacts of the Great Depression?

It’s hard to precisely pin down all the ways the Great Depression impacted the world, because we’ll never know a world that didn’t suffer through that decade-long downturn. While plenty of lessons were learned, many of them seem to be tossed out by modern politicians, who are gleefully repeating many of the mistakes that landed us in that international economic disaster.

The harshest impacts of the Great Depression were felt for more than 10 years after the 1929 stock market crash, and most areas didn’t fully recover until the early ’40s — right when World War II was kicking into gear. That made a pretty massive impact on nations across the globe, which makes it hard to track which devastating situation — the first World War, the Depression, or the second World War — was behind the developments that followed through the ’40s and on.