Alex Tabarrok agrees that the "deaths of despair" narrative has been oversold. But he's not ready to give it up completely:
I wouldn’t, however, throw out despair as an organizing principle. The evidence on “despair” goes beyond death to include a host of co-morbidities such as mental stress, marriage rates, labor force participation rates and other measures of well being. Regardless of the precise population to which these problems attach they are co-morbidities and I suspect not by accident.
I'm sympathetic to this notion. The mental image it brings to mind is a poverty-stricken Appalachian community with no jobs and half the people strung out on Oxy or worse. But this probably just shows that I'm as vulnerable to media hysterics as anyone. So let's look at the evidence for the three things Alex mentions.
Remember that we're trying to account for a slowdown in life expectancies that began around 1998 among high school dropouts. But here are marriage rates:
As you can see, marriage rates have been falling since the '60s. Among high school dropouts they actually stabilized in the late '90s.
Next up is labor force participation:
Among men, labor force participation has been falling forever with one exception: high school dropouts. Their labor participation has been increasing recently:
There's certainly no indication here that anything negative happened around 1998. Among women, labor force participation declined after the Great Recession but then turned back up. Today it's only about 2% below its peak.
Finally we have mental stress, and here the evidence is conflicting. Evidence from disability claims suggests mental health in general got worse until the early 2000s, when it flattened and then improved:
The annual APA survey says that stress hasn't increased lately:
But then again, there's this:
The increase here isn't huge, but it's been steady since 1999 for all age groups. In addition, there's considerable evidence of increasing teen stress, though only since about 2012 or so.
Altogether, of the three co-morbidities Alex mentions, marriage has been stable since 1998 among high school dropouts; labor force participation has improved; and mental health is equivocal. Over the same period material conditions have improved:
Overall, the notion that despair has increased among Americans in general, and among high school dropouts in particular, is an attractive theory but it really doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence. Americans have gotten angrier over the past 20 years, but probably not gloomier.
I don't get the objection to the word "despair." You're all looking for an alternate explanation to account for an increase in certain men killing themselves (slowly or quickly) and because you can't find a pay- or labor- or stress-related reason to point to, you're assuming the despair doesn't exist. It doesn't work that way.
What is despair? A sense of hopelessness, a certain type of giving up. In psychological terms, it would fall under depression.
If a man kills himself, he may or may not have money or job or stress problems. But does he act out of despair? Pretty much by definition, he does. He's given up. Sometimes that happens suddenly (suicide), sometimes more slowly (drug addiction, obesity, engaging in other risky behaviors, etc.).
Economics is easy to chart but to understand despair, you may need to go elsewhere.
Economics is easy to chart but to understand despair, you may need to go elsewhere.
In other words the statistics don't support your favored narrative.
You shouldn't try so hard to miss the point.
+1
Depression is what leads to suicide not "despair". A person can have an objectively good life yet still suffer from crushing depression-- and end up a suicide.
Harvard Health Publishing:
Most people who commit suicide are depressed, but what triggers this irrevocable step varies from person to person. Suicide may stem from intense feelings of anger, despair, hopelessness, or panic. Sometimes it's carried out under the sway of a highly distorted or psychotic idea. Many suicides are impulsive.
No, these statistics donn't. What's your point?
It may be the mismatch between expectations and reality. Family annihilation killings, for example, tend to be white men who are at least middle class. Suicides in jail are most often among people who have been arrested for the first time.
People imagined progress and advancement, but their lives do not match it. They grew up thinking they'd have union jobs, families, and their own home. Instead they can barely make the rent and don't see that changing anytime soon.
They may not see themselves as in despair - they have friends, fun, and some stuff they can afford. But they are stuck enough in life to engage in slightly self-destructive behaviors. Some drugs, a crappy diet, smoking, too much alcohol, too much sitting on the couch. Enough people do that, and you will have a significant number who are unlucky enough to have the slightly bad choices do them in.
"It may be the mismatch between expectations and reality."
Yes, indeed. I think that's a tremendous part of the problem. Life becomes a long road increasingly distant from where you once thought you would be.
Without wanting to diminish your point, individuals are individuals.
We can find examples of successful (or wealthy, or beloved) people who killed themselves, or examples of happy people living in degradation. Nonetheless we don't conclude that success, wealth, and the love of others are unimportant, or that we should strive to increase the amount of degradation.
What matters for the purposes of understanding *society* is what happens in the aggregate. That much I agree with Kevin.
Where I disagree with him is with regard to the specific statistics he has chosen to look at. In that respect I agree with you – there is something going on. It's not captured by Kevin's statistics. But it is (IMHO) real, and could be captured by a different set of statistics (as I suggest in my long comment below).
Good comments. Much food for thought. I agree with the idea we live in a broken culture. We've lost something important -- the sense that we're all in this together. Don't mean to overstate that all was once hunky-dory. But we have indeed fractured certain expectations of what living in society is about. We seem to have given up on an unrealized vision that once held us together. It's no surprise so many people have given up on themselves.
There's a dictionary issue here. One might infer, although a short poem is a weak basis for a diagnosis, that Richard Cory suffered from really major depression or some similar mental illness. I would tend to define "despair" as a response to external conditions that are perceived to be both intolerable and unlikely to improve. "Depression" is a response to conditions internal to the depressed person, conditions which in very severe cases can be perceived to be intolerable and unlikely to improve.
[sigh] Reading this just makes me so ... depressed.
Does it perhaps make you feel "bbleh?"
Kevin has made an assumption that these other factors should line up in time precisely with the deaths he is trying to explain. If deaths increase a bit in 1998 (which itself is somewhat pulled out of thin air), then other factors must also have occured in 1998.
A lag seems appropriate...along with the admission that we dont really understand this topic at all and have no idea what we should be looking for. Drawing random graphs to prove our priors is fun....but we should admit as much.
I seem to recall that, the last time we went through this, the rise in mortality was mostly due to metabolic illness related to obesity. Nothing in this last set of charts suggests anything different.
The fall in marriage rates since the 90's is amusing; it almost suggests that marriage, like other social ills, varied with lead intake. Kevin notes "Among high school dropouts they actually stabilized in the late '90s." They also stabilized among college graduates. Go figure.
It's generally contended that immigrants tend to be healthier and live longer than natives. Is that wrong? Don't immigrants from south of the border tend not to be highly educated? There's a contradiction here; are the illegals simply not counted? Do they simply just go home when they get older?
Immigrants tend to be young-- which translates into better health.
Just spit balling, but could all high school drop outs still be too large? Maybe this is really focused on a particular subset of that group. Date is probably harder to come by, but maybe looking only at rural high school drop outs, breaking out the data by age cohorts, or excluding immigrants would look different?
It feels to me that there was a break, at least among college educated people, back around the time of the Reagan years. My recollection of the 80's was that motivation shifted toward making money, lots more MBA's. I think we turned inward as a nation, movement that was perhaps reinforced by the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. We seemed to retreat into a kind of dull hedonism as a society. I was struck by our retreat from manned space travel, placing the moon and mars on hold... Guess I'm trying to say that we seemed to lose our nerve and decided to focus on generating wealth, which became an end in itself.
Now I'm wandering around so I'll stop with this. I'll just add that I think we consigned ourselves to mediocrity, despite the constant march of science and technology which became more incomprehensible and at the same time the source of ongoing amusement to fill our time.
Well, now we've moved on to ensuring nobody has to suffer any risks, microaggressions are viewed like violent felonies, and don't you DARE to comment on anybody's appearance! EVER. Also, any history that makes anybody feel "uncomforable" has to be banned.
Progress marches on!
"Deaths of Despair" just means deaths due to suicide, drug addiction, and alcohol related liver disease. So obviously, the thing that happened around 1998 is Oxycontin.
If you're just arguing that those deaths aren't due to "despair" then ok, so what? The people addicted to Oxy may not report themselves as being n despair, they may be, in fact, in the "musculoskeletal" disability group because they got addicted due through pain management.
Stress: Average stress is average. We just get accustomed to whatever level of stress we are dealing with. So the fact that Stress is pretty steady at 5 seems perfectly normal to me even if actually stressors are higher.
Looking at the Marriage graph:
If you're 45 in 1998 with a 60% marriage rate, then you were 20 in 1973 with an 80% marriage rate. You grew up looking at all of the adults in your life being successfully married and with a successful life. Then you hit 45 and you're part of the 40% who don't have that.
I think the marriage rate graph supports Alex's claim.
Fox News. Started 1996. It (and the growth of right wing crank press in general) is the reason people are angrier. There was a seed of discontent. It got amplified. Social media takes the crank email chains of the 2000s and amps the power up to 11. No sane politicians can get through the GOP primaries in red states anymore, so the craziness is in the system now.
You beat me to it. Always nice to blame Fox. But I blame Clinton--he won, beating the rightful representative of the Republican establishment, who'd won a war, ended the Vietnam syndrome, managed the ending of the Cold War. And who was Clinton? A womanizing, draft-dodging, pot-smoking, slick-oil salesman, married to an outspoken harridan, a man who jumped the Democratic queue and only won a plurality of votes.
Further, the media rejoiced in the ability to investigate him and his administration, exaggerating many of the misdeeds. (Don't get me started on Jeff Gerth and the export control "scandal".)
Seriously, I think Fox rode the wave of Clinton-hatred and Newt rabble-rousing.
It would be nice to see some polling which might back up my kneejerk reaction.
Craigslist killed the classified ads. That's what happened. Like falling dominos, the way to get jobs shifted from local ads for local businesses to resume machines like monster jobs all online all requiring degrees and certifications.
The haves with computer skills managed fine. But the low computer skills people are left behind. So without increased wage growth, the rise of McFry jobs, and the lack of business communities while Amazon disrupted local retail, there was nothing left. Despair is now hurtling its way to the creative class via AI everything, so we ain't seen nothin' yet.
If you want to account for the drop-off in longevity, you must first find out why people are dying, that is the medical cause of death. There must be good data on this, although the information on educational or economic level may be lacking. Then those rates can be compared with other phenomena in this and other countries. bad Jim above says the main factor causing increased mortality is obesity - is this wrong?
But just trying to correlate the declining longevity rates directly with societal phenomena is the wrong approach.
A generation that started to become notably overweight in the early 80s begins to die of it around 1998.
But I don't want to belubber the point.
What cld said.*
I'm willing to bet that ultra-processed foods became increasingly widespread in the 70's and 80's, and the health effects from the associated obesity and diabetes became widespread in the 90's and 00's.
* Except for the "belubber" pun.
None of the metrics designed to measure economic efficiencies will reveal much about the despair shading America.
"The mental image it brings to mind is a poverty-stricken Appalachian community with no jobs and half the people strung out on Oxy or worse. But this probably just shows that I'm as vulnerable to media hysterics as anyone. "
One place to look where real numbers are provided, as opposed to hysteria, is "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010"
The author specifically focuses on White America to avoid the inevitable backlash if he were to investigate the same phenomena in non-white populations.
His overall thesis is not exactly despair, it's more "broken culture" (ie essentially the same argument as Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s). So why broken culture, given that the supposed historical reasons in the case of Moynihan are not present in Murray's broken populations?
Murray's argument is that this is not exactly a deliberate choice by the US elites to condemn poor whites, but a deliberate decision to no longer care about them except as objects of virtue signaling.
(Essentially this is the flip side of meritocracy and sorting; once you have an elite that believes they deserve what they have [as opposed to being born lucky], they lose all sense of noblesse oblige which was in fact a very real thing up until about the 1960s, at least in the Euro-Christian tradition.
And once that elite does not grow up around the different from them, ie the poor, whether as servants or in school, or as war comrades, again there's a loss of understanding as to the realities of such people.
Finally add into that the belief [theological, ie axiomatic, as opposed to grounded in experience] that democracy [a normative belief as to the dignity and worth of each human] means anti-aristocracy [ie a belief that all humans are essentially equal in their skills, strengths, and weaknesses, their personalities, and their degree of self-control; and you have a perfect storm)
So what we get in the 1960s is what one might call the first stage of "rationalist" culture, the application to *everyone* of various ideas from the Western Tradition that, in the past were understood to perhaps be appropriate to the most disciplined, and self-controlled individuals, with the largest amount of slack to fall back on (family, wealth) if things went wrong. This progressed from no-fault divorce to "sure, marry whom you love at 17, your teenage intuition can't be wrong" to drugs and "if it feels good, do it" to "who needs a man if you want a child" and so on and so on.
After two generations of this, the US has basically split into two societies (Morlocks and Eloi?), a high functioning society that treats this pseudo-culture promulgated in movies, TV, and pop songs as the stream of nonsense it is, with enough cultural and family resources to (mostly) withstand the tide; and a low-functioning society that mostly believes and lives it.
Sure there are kids from this Eloi society that will take their drug experimentation too far, that will get pregnant at 16 or marry at 18, that will drop out of school. But *mostly* family and the lived culture manage (so far...) to guide them down the bourgeois path of self-control, delayed gratification, and careful thought about the important decisions of life.
Meanwhile the Morlocks are the opposite. Again there are a few who do manage to escape ala J D Vance, who are born with self-discipline or are taught it (often via the military), but for most it's easiest to just go with the flow of the destructive cultuer around them. One can draw parallels to indigenous groups in various places around the world, and to other subgroups in the US, but going down that path is a distraction – it lands up circling and obsessing over the same old things that were specifically *not* the case for poor white culture, ie "racism", "colonialism", etc etc.
So, OK, Murray spells this all out in terms of dates and numbers, and gives his theory as to why it happened. How do we reverse it?
Well that's the question isn't it?
First step is even wanting to reverse it. Murray gives an argument (and I think it's a compelling one) that the current US elite has no interest in reversing it; to admit the situation, let alone what caused it, would require rethinking too many cherished beliefs. (Plenty of black "conservative" writers, eg Thomas Sowell [in massive detail] or John McWhorter [in shorter but pithier books] say the same thing, only as applied to their particular populations.)
So I am honestly not at all confident that the situation can be reversed. Historically the usual situation in society has been the existence of an aristocracy with one culture and a rabble with a degenerate form of that same culture.
Euro-Christianity was somewhat unique in evolving in that aristocracy (in spite of what you may have been told) *mostly* a sense of noblesse oblige coupled with a *mostly* productive set of bourgeois values that they then imposed (with some degree of force) on the rabble. We seem to be past the historical circumstances that resulted in that particular aristocracy, and imposing culture (even without force, let alone via force) is frowned upon...
So we're embarked on a grand new adventure that I do not expect to end well. My guess is that the number of Eloi descending to Morlock status each year is higher than the number of Morlocks rising to Eloi.
Kevin's numbers state that this is too bleak a view, that the obvious correlates of Morlock status (ie marriage and a job) are not falling in the way they were. The optimistic view is that the second generation of fallout from the 60s saw, even as young teenagers, the extent to which their parents had fscked up their lives and families, and determined to do better. That's the world of graphs showing fewer teen pregnancies and less teen drug use.
But it's unclear to me that this reflects a wider genuine embrace of bourgeois culture as opposed to less opportunity by teens (some combination of better policing of drugs and more access to contraceptives). The destructive behavior seems to have shifted up to begin in the twenties rather than the teens. It's difficult to find numbers that exactly show what one would like to see, but overall (as opposed to teen) drug use or alcoholism is flat to rising (depending on exactly what you look at).
Likewise the marriage numbers to my eye aren't enough. I'd like to know something about marriage "success" rates in the population of interest (ie how many marriages, how many divorces, how long the marriages last, in the "poor white" community).
Similarly the job numbers to my eyes simply indicate that there remain (for now) jobs that people are willing to pay to have done, and that can be done by people from non-bourgeois culture (ie don't require a substantial degree of training, self-discipline, long planning horizon, can easily be started then stopped, etc). This
may not last depending on changes in so many ways (more retail shifts to online? robot warehouse workers? ...)
So Murray's take (and mine) is that
- this is about broken culture, in particular a rejection of bourgeois values in favor of a "just do it" live for the day ethos. This manifests in some ways that we can easily track (eg drug overdoses, hard spirits consumption), some ways that we can track but less easily classify (excess morbidity in certain groups), and in ways that we cannot really track, quantify, or even discuss without contention ("wasted lives").
- it's unclear to me that it's reversing.Teen numbers IMHO reflect better teen policing, not a real change in the underlying dynamics.
- we have one example of how this reversed that's well understood (the Euro-Christian experience, kickstarted by the Protestant Reformation) and a few that are not well understood (at least I don't understand them!) – the Jews in 19th C Europe, the overseas Chinese/Lebanese/Parsees, the Japanese post-Meiji.
But (IMHO)
+ we don't know enough from these to be sure of "implementing a program",
+ even if we did know what to do, implementing cultural change is out of fashion,
+ which gets to the point that our elites don't even *really* care about this problem, certainly not enough to go through the re-evaluations required to deal with it, mostly not enough to even admit there is a problem.
I have read most of what Murray wrote and a lot of Sowell ( though not most of it, that guy is prolific!). I don't find their thesis at all convincing. Going back centuries states tried the whole moral persuasion and example thing, it never seemed to have any effect. In some limited instances we can point to areas where the state activity undermined itself, like AFDC penalizing married couples or cohabitating couples, but for the most part it did nothing.
Having known both working class and people with professional backgrounds growing up I never observed any particular differences in how they talked about marriage or the importance of education, provided you were cut out for it. I have never seen personally or read any convincing evidence that there is a significant class divide in how people talk about these things. The argument is always the behavior differs therefore there must be a cultural difference.
But the reason for this, and Murray actually basically writes this, is that other explanations are unacceptable to these authors. There is a lot of sociological research in these areas, though it doesn't get the kind of advertising that Sowell or especially Murray get. They point to the decline of unionization, largely driven by a long campaign against unions, and the shift away from economic security for the lower half of the economic scale as causes. Shifts in the corporate world towards flexible scheduling and other anti-worker measures reinforce this.
There are some cultural shifts as well, changes in women's rights made them more independent, social pressures to attend church declined, and marriage shifted to require a much greater investment on both people's parts (marriages from a century ago often involved both people living largely separate lives with the man out of the house much of the time, makes it easier for bad marriages to continue from inertia than with modern marriages where people are expected to actually like each other and do things together).
But the economic changes between the post 1970 and pre 1970 track pretty well on their own. All these social indicators decline after policy changes in ways that make people less secure and begin to improve a bit as economic conditions improve, this tends to follow if you look at specific groups and regions. Complicating the narrative reveals more, go back a couple of centuries and people were married despite poor economic conditions, but it doesn't appear that these marriages had the positive effects on children that we see today, childrearing and family life are too different to compare easily. There's an interaction between pressures placed on parents and the ability to maintain these social markers like marriage. There are also probably factors like lead exposure, the same kind of effects that cause increases in crime also likely lead to marriages being less successful.
None of this is to say that I am against cultural explanations in general, back when I was doing graduate work this was my focus. Thing is that culture is a much more difficult to work with explanation than other causes as well as something that changes and adapts to it's conditions rapidly. For a cultural explanation to be likely you really have to eliminate other potential causal factors first, culture will adapt to its environment so if you don't understand that environment it is easy to mistake cultural adaptation for cause rather than effect. Neither Murray or Sowell really engage with other factors deeply enough to be convincing, they find other structural factors ideologically unappealing and are actively looking for alternatives. In my opinion they are reversing causality and mistake effects for causes. I will give Sowell more credit here, he is a decent researcher and the books I have read do address this to some extent, even if I find his arguments unconvincing. Murray however doesn't really bother, he wants to stir up controversy and seems to deliberately avoid addressing alternative explanations for what is happening. Guy wants to start arguments and sell books, not explain things.
"I have read most of what Murray wrote and a lot of Sowell ( though not most of it, that guy is prolific!). I don't find their thesis at all convincing. Going back centuries states tried the whole moral persuasion and example thing, it never seemed to have any effect. In some limited instances we can point to areas where the state activity undermined itself, like AFDC penalizing married couples or cohabitating couples, but for the most part it did nothing."
Have you specifically read _Coming Apart_?
I am trying to keep my contribution to this discussion from degenerating into political cliches. And yes, we know that the Republican party has said the obvious things about the consequences of AFDC and suchlike. But that is not the argument I am making here.
The argument here involves few political/legal issues. You could start to argue that no-fault divorce and suchlike are legal; but it's essentially an argument about the pop culture manufactured by the elites. It's about how movies and TV show and glamorize life-style choices that most of those involved in creating the movies and TV shows would not choose for themselves and their families. It's about Murphy Brown, Dan Quayle's response, and the almost unanimous elite sneering at that response.
You don't have to an Evangelical Christian (or even a Christian, or even religious) to see a lot that's very ugly or dysfunctional in US culture – and yet it's very difficult to avoid this, and anyone who speaks up for fewer gangster values and more bourgeois values is shouted down.
(And BTW we know plenty about at least some child-rearing of the past; we just don't like what we have learned, so we pretend it didn't happen, or that it was worse than it was.
We know for example that in England the nuclear family structure has been present since at least about the 12th century, and that children older than six were frequently raised in families that were not their own [think boarding school] on the grounds [correctly, IMHO] that parents would be too soft on their own children, as opposed to outsiders.
It's not a mystery why Europe (and England in particular) created so many men who were willing and able to march into some random place and immediately take command.
You may not like the fact that they did so, and how that turned out; but it is an astonishing fact that so many men of that calibre were created so consistently, for so long, and from every walk of society. We simply don't create men like that any more; because we don't raise children like that any more. And while you may not want to be raising The Man who Would be King, we're also not raising men like Carnegie or Vanderbilt.)
The fact that you take Murray seriously tells everybody all they need about your moral compass. " "This progressed from no-fault divorce to "sure, marry whom you love at 17, your teenage intuition can't be wrong"" In reality society moved in the exact opposite direction that you claim. Whereas in the civil war era, not being married by 17 made you a spinster. It was still the norm 50 years later. Now, it almost never occurs, is illegal in many states. And when it does occur, the couple is showered with massive levels of moral opprobrium.
Looks like we need an LLM filter here.
"Among men, labor force participation has been falling forever with one exception: high school dropouts. Their labor participation has been increasing recently:" In reality, working age labor force participation rates are near an all time high. The only time they have exceeded the present is around Bill Clinton's 2nd term. The problem with just looking at labor force participation rates of men over 25 is that the number of men over 65 has been growing at 3% per year since 2000 while the number less than 65 has been stagnant. And yes, lots of 80 year old men are not in the labor force. Hard to take anything seriously after saying something as incompetent as what is being said here. More specificially, the number of college educated man over the age of 25 not in the work force has doubled since 1995. Amazingly enough, the number of college educated man over the age of 70 has more than doubled since 2000. End of story.