Ever since Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University coined the term “deaths of despair” in their 2015 study on rising mortality rates among working class whites, the public and policymakers have been focused on the role of long-term un- and under-employment in rising levels of suicide, addiction and alcoholism among white, less-educated workers. The jobs that had sustained the white working class, it was argued, moved out and drugs and alcohol moved in. The Case-Deaton study codified an unease in the public mind that automation and international trade had deprived working class whites of jobs they had depended on for generations to achieve and maintain middle-class lives. Productive work was replaced by social collapse culminating in rising numbers of early deaths.
Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University and Qitong Wang at the University of Southern California have taken a different cut at the data and arrived at an alternative theory: In some of the hardest-hit regions of the Appalachian coal-belt, declining employment may not have been the principle source of opioid-related mortality. The “origin story” of addiction and death, they say, was not the absence of work but the coal jobs themselves.
Read Full Article »