And will he do more than just throw money at people who need real meaning?
And will he do more than just throw money at people who need real meaning?
E ven if COVID-19 disappeared tomorrow, America would still be facing an unprecedented social and health crisis. Does the new president see it?
In 2015, just as Donald Trump was beginning to launch his campaign to Make America Great Again, two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, released a study documenting the frightening rise of “deaths of despair” among white non-college-educated Americans, showing even a decrease of life expectancy driven by alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide. The paper focused political attention on depressed regions of the United States. It added analytical heft and moral weight to other studies showing that our trade relationship with China had concentrated and unaddressed economic and social costs.
This wasn’t just a matter of a few struggling towns and dilapidated storefronts. Huge sections of America were starting to resemble Russia during Yeltsin-era shock therapy, where men seemed to drop out of economic and social life and began dying at a truly frightening rate.
And it’s getting worse.
Initial data from the Centers for Disease Control suggest that in the past year, more Americans died from drug overdose than in any previous twelve-month period in our history. What’s frightening is that this is a surge on top of a surge. Approximately 81,000 people died of causes related to drug overdose between June 2019 and May 2020, a nearly 20 percent spike from the previous year, and one pre-dating COVID-era unemployment and lockdowns, which had such profound consequences for mental health and wellbeing.
A paper released by the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care has seen alarming evidence of a COVID-era surge in “deaths of despair,” with fentanyl being an early and obvious culprit. They conclude that “deaths of despair should be seen as the epidemic within the pandemic. “
These deaths of despair, and the declining life expectancy that goes with them, have also put into distressing relief certain comments by Democratic leaders. Hillary Clinton wrote off roughly half of Donald Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” And after her election loss, she bragged that she won the productive parts of America, representing two-thirds of America’s GDP. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that the other one-third of America that was left behind might deserve to be left behind. That polarization of “productive” and “unproductive” America seems to have gotten more pronounced in 2020. Biden won an area that produces fully 70 percent of the nation’s GDP.
The liberal theory of America’s modern economy is that any concentrated economic losses from trade can be ameliorated by redistribution from the winners. The theory admits that disruption is real but posits that the winners of globalization can simply buy off the losers, to maintain continued political consent. Progressives contemplating the idea that technology and trade may mean the end of lower-skilled labor in rich nations have become more interested in policies such as the universal basic income.
And our COVID-era relief measures have been an experimental run on these policies. Over 10 million low-skilled workers immediately lost their jobs at the start of the lockdowns last March. Millions of others didn’t lose their jobs exactly, but they lost the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the enterprises that employ them. These groups of people have been buoyed by a dramatic federal expansion of unemployment benefits and federal loans to businesses.
In fact, the federal government’s response was so dramatic that household incomes surged at the start of the pandemic. The Biden team’s first policy priority will be to send out more checks on a near-universal basis.
While COVID-era relief policies have been a marvel of improvisation and sheer institutional might in the United States, it’s notable that even when we got a temporary glimpse of an economy with rising incomes and disappearing work at the lower end — a kind of Marxist afternoon reverie — suicide and drug deaths continued to rise.
Man doesn’t live by bread alone. Michael Lind has described these policies of just throwing cash at workers who are otherwise written off as “palliative liberalism.” These policies are an attempt to purchase “political acquiescence from workers who have stagnant or declining incomes.”
What men and women need to avoid deaths of despair is not just incomes, but fulfilling roles and work in society. No single policy can address this. But the trends are not good, and Joe Biden’s presidency can falter on them. For decades America has seen declining labor-force participation among men. For decades, America has seen an increase in drug abuse. For decades, American participation in civil-society organizations and churches has been declining, and with fertility plunging, extended-family trees are splitting into shriveled, disconnected branches and twigs.
If Joe Biden doesn’t meaningfully address his administration and the American government to these problems, he will be a failure.