dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html

When the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first published their research on “deaths of despair” five years ago, they focused on middle-aged whites. So many white working-class Americans in their 40s and 50s were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse that the overall mortality rate for the age group was no longer falling – a rare and shocking pattern in a modern society.

But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data, it became clear that the grim trends didn’t apply only to middle-aged whites. Up and down the age spectrum, deaths of despair have been surging for people without a four-year college degree:

Case and Deaton — a married couple who are both economists at Princeton — try to explain the causes in a new book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.” Their basic answer is that working-class life in the United States is more difficult than it is in any other high-income country. “European countries have faced the same kind of technological change we have, and they’re not seeing the people killing themselves with guns or drugs or alcohol,” Case says. “There is something unique about the way the U.S. is handling this.”

Inequality has risen more in the United States — and middle-class incomes have stagnated more severely — than in France, Germany, Japan or elsewhere. Large corporations have increased their market share, and labor unions have shriveled, leaving workers with little bargaining power. Outsourcing has become the norm, which means that executives often see low-wage workers not as colleagues but as expenses.

And the United States suffers from by far the world’s most expensive health-care system. It acts as a tax on workers and drains resources that could otherwise be spent on schools, day care, roads, public transit and more. Despite its unparalleled spending, the American medical system also fails to keep many people healthy.

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The two economists initially focused on non-Hispanic whites because the mortality trends were worst for them. Deaths rates from suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse among whites surpassed the rates for blacks shortly after 2000, for example. But the black working class is hardly thriving – and deaths of despair have surged among them in the last few years. Overall life expectancy remains significantly higher for whites than blacks. So, of course, do incomes and wealth.