Krugman: Despair, American Style

[MikeWB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opinion/despair-american-style.html

Despair, American Style

A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are "down on America," and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.

Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. And we don't really understand why.

There has been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.

Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We've seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it's a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.

Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it's not really news that there's a drug problem in the heartland.

But what's causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?

If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it's all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.

For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden's middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America's.

You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.

What about a materialist explanation? Is rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class?

Well, it's not that simple. We are, after all, talking about the consequences of behavior, and culture clearly matters a great deal. Most notably, Hispanic Americans are considerably poorer than whites, but have much lower mortality. It's probably worth noting, in this context, that international comparisons consistently find that Latin Americans have higher subjective well-being than you would expect, given their incomes.

So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.

That sounds like a plausible hypothesis to me, but the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society as a whole.

In particular, I know I'm not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won't solve their problems, but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at least seem to feel their pain.

At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair.

[Michael K.]

I dislike Paul Krugman's gloating tone.  This is really his anti-white anti-Christian bias showing here.  His rose-tinted analysis of an America that is just better all the time lacks contact with a reality in which opportunity for advancement beyond the working class doesn't exist for many, for the first time in memory.  Add to that the despair born of shouldering the human costs of the neoconservatives' imperial crusade, which is disproportionately borne by the same working class whites, and what we have is an answer as to why America can be so depressed that they are overdosing on opioids.  Paul Krugman is just living out the Jewish commie stereotype, like so many gold toothed gangsters of the soft life.

[MikeWB]

I dislike Krugman immensely however if you look at his past columns and opinions, he's been a lot more right than wrong. He does get things right on the whole. However, I don't like his opinions and think we need to fight the ideas of globalists/jews that are shaping this country.

One scary thing that's happening is the dying out and displacement of white race in America. Whites are quickly being exterminated by blacks & hispanics. As middle class is being gutted by globalists, so are the white people.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-group-of-middle-aged-american-whites-is-dying-at-a-startling-rate/2015/11/02/47a63098-8172-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7_story.html

A group of middle-aged whites in the U.S. is dying at a startling rate

A large segment of white middle-aged Americans has suffered a startling rise in its death rate since 1999, according to a review of statistics published Monday that shows a sharp reversal in decades of progress toward longer lives.

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The rising death rate was accompanied by an increase in the rate of illness, the authors wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[Prestigious medical journals rejected stunning study on deaths among middle-aged whites]

"Drugs and alcohol, and suicide . . . are clearly the proximate cause," said Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, who co-authored the paper with his wife, Anne Case. Both are economics professors at Princeton University.

"Half a million people are dead who should not be dead," he added. "About 40 times the Ebola stats. You're getting up there with HIV-AIDS."

Death rate for U.S. non-Hispanic whites (USW), U.S. Hispanics and six comparison countries, aged 45-54. (Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
Since at least 1970, Americans and residents of other wealthy countries have generally enjoyed longer and healthier lives, as smoking has declined, better treatments have been developed and preventive measures and lifestyle changes have had an impact.

[Overall death rates in the U.S. are dropping]

But Monday's bleak findings could have far-reaching implications as the surviving members of this sizable segment of the population continue toward retirement and eligibility for Medicare, according to experts. A sicker population that has been less able to prepare for the costs associated with old age will place an increasing burden on society and federal programs, they said.

"This is the first indicator that the plane has crashed," said Jonathan Skinner, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, who reviewed the study and co-authored a commentary that appears with it. "I don't know what's going on, but the plane has definitely crashed.

"High school graduates [and] high school dropouts [are] 40 percent of the population," he added. "It's not just the 10 percent who didn't finish high school. It's a much bigger group."

[2001 Paxil study seems to down play suicide risks in youths]

Death rates for other developed nations examined by the two researchers, as well as rates for U.S. blacks and Hispanics, continued their steady decline of recent decades. Whites in other age groups between 30 and 64, and more educated whites also had lower death rates. But the other age groups also experienced substantially higher death rates from drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

Mortality by cause among white non-Hispanics ages 45-54. (Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
While the death rate for African Americans is still greater than the rate for whites, the turnaround among whites is shocking because of the advantages they enjoy, said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Typically, socioeconomic circumstances "gang up on African Americans, who have lower education, lower incomes and race all working against them," said Weir, who also reviewed the study for the journal. "In this case, that's not happening."

[Understanding suicide, which is surprisingly common in spring]

Weir said economic insecurity, the decay of communities and the breakdown of families probably have had some impact on death and illness rates, in addition to the nation's opioid epidemic and the factors the authors identified. But the study clearly shows they are not the result of diseases such as lung cancer or diabetes, which are declining and increasing slowly, respectively.

Death by poisoning, suicide, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis for white non-Hispanics of varying age groups. (Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
"I think it has to have something to do [with] the pain underlying it," both physical and psychic, he said. "That is the age when people have their midlife crisis . . . I think it has to do with that stage of life, and physical ailments do start to accumulate at that age.

"This paper really is a question, not an answer," he added.

Case and Deaton were examining government statistics on death rates and illness when they discovered the spike in mortality for people ages 45 to 54 in the period between 1999 and 2013.

[There's a high suicide rate among elderly white men]

"We both were sort of blown off our chairs when looking at that," Deaton said. He said they knew that most demographers would look at the numbers and say, " 'You've got to have made a mistake. That cannot possibly be true.' "

When they pored over the data, however, they found that mortality rates for this group had risen an average of a half percent per year since 1999, after falling an average of 2 percent annually for the 20 years before that. If mortality rates group had stayed on their steady downward course, a half-million more people would be alive today, they determined.

When they looked at illness (morbidity), "there was a large and statistically significant decline in the fraction reporting excellent or very good health" that was matched by increased reports of physical pain, according to the study.

The proportion of people who said they were in "serious psychological distress" also rose significantly, the research shows.

Deaton, awarded the Nobel prize for his work on individual consumption choices, has long studied measures of well-being, health and pain. He and Case authored a paper in June that found reports of physical pain "are strongly predictive of suicide in many contexts" and that reports of pain are increasing among middle-aged Americans.

[The man who knows more about death than anyone else]

Their findings have been corroborated by other research. A report from the National Heroin Task Force established by the Justice Department puts the number of overdose deaths from legal and illegal drugs at 110 every day. The heroin death toll has quadrupled in the decade that ended in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry last year reported that 90 percent of the people who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white. Three-quarters said they were introduced to heroin through the use of prescription drugs.

In January, the CDC reported that an average of six people die every day because of alcohol poisoning and that 76 percent are ages 35 to 64. Three-quarters are men.

But just last week, researchers reported that the U.S. death rate for all causes declined 43 percent between 1969 and 2013, from about 1,279 per 100,000 people to about 730. The rate of death caused by strokes, heart disease and cancer all declined significantly, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[Michael K.]

Despair American style = despair Russian style = the hopelessness of being a neoconservative Jew's slave.

http://www.interpretermag.com/high-mortality-rates-killing-off-russia-aganbegyan-says/

Unless Moscow addresses and overcomes "super-high mortality rates" among young people and working-age Russians, the country will face population decline even if the Russian government is able to boost fertility rates, according to Abel Aganbegyan, a member of the Academy of Sciences and a Kremlin advisor.

Indeed, the noted economist says, if Russia were able to reduce mortality rates in the coming years as much as those rates have fallen over the last seven, then anticipated declines in the number of births in the next two decades would not lead to the depopulation of Russia.

But for that happy outcome to occur, Aganbegyan says, Russians must recognize the seriousness of the problem before them, devote far more resources to the solution of demographic challenges, and recognize the real costs of not doing so by putting a price on human life.

In the current issue of Ekspert, the academician says that last year was a good one demographically for the Russian Federation in that the population grew by 24,000 people, the result of a 30 percent increase in the birthrate over the preceding seven years and a 20 percent decline in the deathrate over the same period.

But this one good year must not obscure the seriousness of Russia's demographic problems. Already in 2014, "the number of the dying again has begun to exceed the number being born, and if this tendency continues, then depopulation will be renewed."

Unfortunately, that is a real risk. The reduction in the number of births is connected in the first instance with declines in the number of women in prime child-bearing ages and secondarily with the decline in preferred family size among Russians. Changing this will require far larger investments than the Russian government has yet made, he says.

This challenge, Aganbegyan continues, should direct the attention of Russian policy makers to the possibility of reducing mortality rates and thus extending life expectancies. At present, he notes, "the level of mortality in Russia in comparison with other countries is catastrophically high, and life expectancy is extremely low."

When age structures are standardized, mortality rates in Russia are 40 percent higher than they are in European countries. And Russian life expectancy is almost ten years younger and little different than it was in 1964-1965 in the Soviet Union. But "behind those unfortunate numbers are even worse ones, Aganbegyan says.

The worst is that in the Russian Federation, mortality rates are higher than in other countries among children and among those of working-age, especially men. Infant mortality is 2.3 times higher in Russia than in Europe, and working-age mortality is 3.5 times higher, with 80 percent of those being men.

Both of these depress overall life expectancy figures, Aganbegyan points out, and at present, Russia lags behind "all post-socialist countries except Albania" as well as behind many countries in the developing world.

There are many things that could be done to change that, the Moscow scholar continues: reducing alcohol consumption, improving medical services including putting doctors in ambulances, and promoting a healthier way of life generally through medical and other public institutions.

That will require not just a commitment and more money but a resolution of "one of the most principled issues in this sphere, the question of the value of a human life," something Russia has not yet faced up to. Aganbegyan says his calculations show the death of a working-age Russian costs the economy six to eight million rubles (US $200,000 to $300,000).

When such losses are recognized, he says, the far more modest costs of improved medical care and a better way of life are put in context. Consequently, Aganbegyan argues that setting an official figure for the economic value of a human life is essential if Russia is to do what it has to reduce mortality rates and avoid depopulation.

That's okay, the Jews that run both America and Russia are going to bring in Asians to fill the empty stalls of the extinct whites.  They eat half as much grain, and are used to breeding in conditions of  subhuman desperation.  It don't pay to raise the white ones in a meat operation.

[MikeWB]

Never heard of this Interpretermag.com... let's fact check it a bit:








Jews are constantly trying to control the media & opinions.

[Michael K.]

 Although you don't like Paul Krugman, you don't think that his bias disqualified the facts he is presenting.  I say the same about this Pavel Khodorkovsky.  He actually takes a sympathetic tone about the plight of ethnic Russians, while Krugman is snide and Jewey.  I don't see how you are going to refute specifics with this mention of the author's identity.  He is one of Putin's detractors, but the fact remains that the people you think are living in Utopia, are actually no more nor less suicidal than your fellow Americans after thirty-five years of neoconservatives ruling them.

[Ognir]

I try never to use Wikipedia as a source

96% total control 

[MikeWB]

I try never to use Wikipedia as a source

96% total control 

Always check the citations.