What's killing middle-aged white Americans without a college degree?

[Undertoad]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business...espair/520473/

Two years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an alarming revelation: Middle-aged white Americans without a college degree were dying in greater numbers, even as people in other developed countries were living longer.

The husband-and-wife team argued, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that these white Americans are facing "deaths of despair" — suicide, overdoses from alcohol and drug, and alcohol-related liver disease.
...
Now, in a new paper, the economists explore why this demographic is so unhealthy. They conclude it has something to do with a lifetime of eroding economic opportunities. This may seem like a circular argument, when put together with previous work: Middle-aged Americans aren’t working because they’re sick, and middle-aged Americans are sick because they’re not working. But Case and Deaton argue that it’s not just poor job opportunities that are affecting this demographic, but rather, that these economic misfortunes build up and bleed into other segments of people’s lives, like marriage and mental health. This drives them to alcoholism, drug abuse, and even suicide, they say, in a new paper released Thursday in advance of a conference, the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.

“As the labor market turns against them, and the kinds of jobs they find get worse and worse for people without a college degree, that affects them in other ways too,” Deaton told me.

What differentiates Case and Deaton’s paper is this idea that as people get older and their fates deviate more and more from those of their parents, they struggle to keep their lives together. The very act of doing worse than their parents’ generation—what Case and Deaton call “cumulative disadvantage”—is killing them.

I see this in many of my friends.



They say the European safety net is what prevents a similar result in Europe, which faces the same globalization issues. To me it's more about the trajectory. The landscape of opportunity we looked out on in our 20s, versus the landscape of crush we now look upon in our middle age. Drinking makes sense.

[Clodfobble]

And yet we also hear again and again that a college degree doesn't get you shit anymore, and the country is facing mass shortages of plumbers, electricians, nurses, and all the other skilled trades. I think it's more just that the economy has sucked overall for a good while now, and white men without college degrees have fewer social supports and coping mechanisms than other demographic groups.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Didn't the majority of college grads (not counting a degree basket weaving and the ilk) who found they couldn't find a job, graduate in the last ten years or so? That would be a younger demographic.

I'm seen a lot of middle aged men who's lives are so constrained, so shallow, they'll contemplate suicide or start binge drinking if their football team doesn't make the playoffs, and losing the Superbowl is a disaster equal to 9-11. Hockey and Basketball too, not so much with baseball.

[Griff]

It has been brutal to watch and participate in. This economy which doesn't appear to need people has guided a lot of my choices. The house project was my solution to underemployment at that time followed by a move into human service work because you still need people to work with people. I see the people I went to school with and the shock goes beyond recognizing how old we've gotten, it's how a lot of us look decades older than others.

I think this is a big part of the lack of progress in race relations. A segment of white society has a hard time with the concept of white privilege. It feels like the stakes are higher if they are passed over in favor of a minority candidate because the stakes are higher. I still understand that whites are privileged compared to others but it is no guarantee that they will ever get a sniff of success in a broken economy.

(I could add a nice rant about our kleptocracy and the safety net here but I need to get on the road.)

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Didn't the majority of college grads (not counting a degree basket weaving and the ilk) who found they couldn't find a job, graduate in the last ten years or so? That would be a younger demographic.

And, their time will come soon enough; one quarter to one half of millenials believe their student loans will be forgiven. Reality may bite them in the face.


cites:

2014 survey one quarter

2016 survey one half

[Undertoad]

Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death Than Make Life Worth Living

After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the ultimate problem. Perennially youthful Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced last year a $3 billion initiative to obliterate human disease. Among his many crusades, Paypal co-founder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel aims to end mortality. (“Basically, I’m against it,” he has said.) Alphabet has a whole company devoted to curing this most intractable of inconveniences.

...
But over the past two decades, deaths attributed to inequality, isolation, and addiction have risen for both men and women without a college education in the US. In particular, as Princeton economists revealed today, white middle-aged men with a high school education or less, hit disproportionately by the Great Recession, are dying of despair. Well-heeled techies obsessed with life extension have little to say about these problems, suggesting a grim blind spot: Are they really trying to extend everyone’s lives? Or just those of people already doing great?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Then we can add Apeirophobia to our worries.

[Griff]

Term limits look more important...

[classicman]

... and more desirable than ever.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I used to think if there were term limits they would go in and grab all they could because they couldn't stay. Seems that thinking is wrongly based of the theory the voters would judge their performance and thumbs up or down based on that performance. I can't figure out if times have changed or I was just naive.

[footfootfoot]

I thought it was stubbornness.

[Gravdigr]

Living.

[footfootfoot]

The #1 cause of death.

[Carruthers]

Life's only certainty.

[monster]

but Zombies?