Deaths Of Despair

This is a blunt and brutal look at the hidden epidemic of death among white Americans without a four year degree (WWC). They analyze the deaths among the WWC from suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver disease.  It's sobering, and it explains some of the nihilism that we see from that cohort, and why some of them lash out by supporting someone who doesn't care for them, but at least hates in the same direction they hate.  For WWC people, the America of the college educated is simply not the same country many of them live in.

(I should take a moment, that this is not the same as the Brooklyn based podcaster who flames people on Twitter for saying that a vote for Joe Biden is a vote to kill Americans. They aren't WWC, as most of them are four-year college graduates. They are roughly right in what is wrong with America, though perhaps they see it in unrealistic terms.  Certainly their prescription for fixing America is badly flawed, in terms of creating a coalition for change.)

Anyway, one of the things public health officials are struggling with with Covid-19 is how to count "added deaths."  We have deaths from Covid-19 that happen in the home without a diagnosis.  We also have people who have other health emergencies like heart attacks who die from the lack of care from an overwhelmed healthcare system.

Now, we need to think about the added deaths of despair. There is a tendency to look at this entirely through the lens of economics.  Certainly the authors look at wage stagnation and health care issues, and the interviewer (it is Vox, after all) wants to keep pushing it back towards economics.  And certainly economics is a huge part of it.

But the erosion of social connectivity feels like it's an essential part of what's driving the deaths of despair.  It's not simply stagnant wages and economic insecurity.  Those things occur everywhere.  Perhaps it is the problem of being poor in a rich country, but that has been true of communities of color forever.  It strikes me that we absolutely must address economic inequality, but that doing so is unlikely to fully solve the problem.