Deaths of despair

In most other advanced countries, mid-life (45-54) mortality rates are falling among all education classes, so the findings by US economists, Nobel Prize-winning Angus Deaton and his economist wife, Princeton University’s Angela Case, have come as a bit of a surprise.

Back in 2015, they revealed that the peculiar trend had been developing in certain parts of the US since the late 1990s — in the southwest mainly — but today the trend has spread nationwide in every level of urbanisation.

Their more recent research is still more shocking as it shows that while the mortality rate among poor whites was around 30 percent lower than African- Americans in 1999, it grew to 30 percent higher than blacks by the end of 2015 and it is worse among men. Since 2000, these poor white men have been dying at double the rate of poor white women and four times more than educated white men.

They are dying from escalating drug and alcohol abuse and suicide, and from increased incidence of heart disease and cancer, the two biggest illnesses of middle age. In their report, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, Deaton and Case dub the deaths as “of despair.” It seems like poor whites, and “poor” means under and uneducated people, ie, having only a high-school diploma or less, are in crisis.

Their low level of education did not matter while manufacturing and agriculture were still heavily dependent on unskilled labour, but since the 1970s and the rise of new, more efficient technologies and globalisation they have been displaced. The economic crisis of 2007 did not help, nor has the slow recovery.

Unlike African Americans who were always used to acute deprivation and scarce and low-paid employment, which was also the plight of many Latin American immigrants going back a long way, those poorly educated white people have been unable to adjust to the difficult, altered realities of their lives.

The authors report the group growing more socially dysfunctional with the steady deterioration in economic and social well-being experienced by each succeeding generation. The marriage rate has dropped, fewer people have jobs, and they suffer an increase in mental and physical health issues.

Of course, their response was to vote in last year’s presidential election for Donald Trump who promised he would turn their lives around by bringing back jobs.

That huge underbelly of US poverty and deprivation can be still more negatively affected by the failure of President Trump to deliver on his ambitious policies.

It is quite a feat to pull off and impossible without radical social policies to return a very sizeable section of the population to functional levels.

It would be interesting to see a similar study on why in TT we are growing increasingly socially dysfunctional and locate it among certain identifiable groups.

Although our citizens are living longer, which reflects an improvement in social provision, the homicide rate reveals a deep sickness. Our violence rates reflect, probably, the same hopelessness among the young in our society as in the middle-aged white US male, married to a deep anger.

Why are there nearly 200 gangs in operation in this country? What are they seeking and why? These seismic transformations do not happen overnight and we are not so inept that we cannot analyse the situation and come up with some answers. The problem seems to be that we are utterly daunt - ed by the task n e c - e s s a r y because the ans w e r s are not easy.