Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his HBO special and Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn for the New York Times, all interviewed Anne Case and her husband Angus Deacon. Both of them are economists from Princeton University but we won’t hold that against them. As she said, “Whites are reporting poorer and poorer health, more and more pain, and more and more social isolation. More depression. Along with this increase in mortality from drugs, alcohol, suicide there is just a lot more morbidity, pain, and social isolation.” Anne Case came up with the expression “deaths of despair” and it has become very popular.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, conducted an important study of mortality and wrote the book, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century. Dr. Gupta interviewed them for the television show. In that book they described “deaths of despair” as “death by drugs, alcohol and suicide.” According to them, so many people have died from deaths of despair to equal all the people who have died of AIDs since the beginning of the AIDs crisis. Those deaths were enough to cause life expectancy to fall first for whites and then for the entire population. That is a very unusual event.
These people were the children of the people that won the world war and were expected to live glorious lives in the land of the free and the brave. The parents expected their children to do even better than they did. Those expectations were often not met. As Deaton put it, “They were promised the earth but they did not inherit it.” Case said, “in every state but 2, cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholic liver disease went up. And in every state drug poisoning went up. In every state between 1999 and 2015 suicide rates went up for people aged 22 to 64. If you treat people in a really shabby way for long enough bad things happen to them. That happened to African Americans forever and it started to happen to whites with a High School degree or less, starting probably in the mid-seventies. And now bad things are happening to both of those groups.
Dr. Gupta that if we wanted to know the effects of economic decline all we had to do was visit the American Rust Belt. There they produced more steel than the rest of the world put together. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week smog from those plants went into the atmosphere of American cities.
Swissvale Pennsylvania , according to Eric Horgos, is the valley that is “the epicenter of the greatest industrial collapse in the entire developed world in the 1980s. 1983 is when economic Armageddon hit them.”
Is it surprising that people who lived a certain way that they liked for 30 years and then had the rug pulled out from under them wanted to commit suicide? Is it any wonder they turned to alcohol or drugs? Is it any wonder that they despaired? Is it any wonder that they gave up on politicians that that they had once respected, and then turned instead to a demagogue?