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Capitalism Is Killing Us
In their new book, Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue that suicides, overdoses, and income inequality are consequences of capitalism.
Despair may sound like an abstract phenomenon for economists to study, but using education as a dividing line—which for them is a close proxy for class—Case and Deaton’s data illustrates just how despair has creeped into the lives of many. Over the last 20 years, representative national surveys show, white people without a bachelor’s degree have reported greater difficulty shopping, watching a movie, relaxing at home, and socializing with friends. They also have reported higher levels of pain, mental distress, and ill health. The percentage of white people ages 45–54 without a bachelor’s degree reporting they’re unable to work rose to 13 percent in 2017 from 4 percent in 1993. For Case and Deaton, the deterioration of conditions of daily life is one of the “background” causes of deaths of despair.
As feelings of physical pain and social isolation have made life harder to bear, manufacturing jobs have been replaced by service jobs, which have fewer benefits and lower wages, a central issue in the authors’ “upheaval” narrative. The primary upheaval experienced by the white working class today, according to the authors, is the power imbalance between capital and labor. This imbalance has been a “slowly unfolding calamity,” according to Case and Deaton. “Rising economic and political power of corporations, and the declining economic and political power of workers, allows corporations to gain at the expense of ordinary people, consumers and particularly workers,” they write. Meanwhile, those at the top of corporations have seen their wealth soar.
“Among America’s 350 largest firms, average CEO earnings in 2018 was $17.2 million, 278 times average earnings.” In the 1960s, the difference in compensation “was only 20 to 1,” and nearly a third of workers had a union job. Today, union density hovers at around just 10 percent. Union halls were once the “center of social life,” according to Case and Deaton, but work life today is more lonely and atomized, and low-wage work, with few benefits, feels impersonal and unfulfilling. Low-wage work has also led to the stagnation of real wages and purchasing power for the working class, all while the cost of health care has skyrocketed, largely because of effective lobbying and government capture. The very structure of the financial system in this country, Case and Deaton argue, is largely responsible for the “deaths of despair” crisis they warned about in 2015.
Of course, these conditions aren’t experienced only by middle-aged white people. But long protected by a governmental and societal safety net, the white working class is now, in Case and Deaton’s telling, in free fall: “Our main argument in this book is that the deaths of despair reflect a long-term and slowly unfolding loss of a way of life for the white, less-educated, working class.”
Case and Deaton appear much more comfortable identifying the deadly rot in America’s economy than they do in calling for its excision. Rather than ending corporate “plunder” for good, they call for “reducing” it; rather than ending rent-seeking, the accumulation of wealth without creating any new wealth, they call for “limiting” it. “We do not argue for higher taxes on the rich,” they write, because, curiously, they do not see inequality itself as “the fundamental problem,” even though earlier in their book they observe that despair, death, and inequality are all linked. Rather, they conclude, “the fundamental problem is unfairness.”
The path out of despair favored by Case and Deaton—tweaking capitalism to be more fair—is in contention with the alarm bell they’re ringing. If the estimated 150,000 deaths this year from suicide, alcohol, and overdoses combined didn’t already make this clear, the threat of Covid-19 means that now is no time for half-measures.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200424034154/https://www.thenation.com/a
rticle/culture/case-deaton-deaths-of-d
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The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways.
Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/thinking-about-the-poor/articles/fal
ling
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways.
Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/thinking-about-the-poor/articles/fal
ling
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
So did you pay them $25 for a subscription, or was reading the first paragraph enough for you?
Quote:
To read the full article online, please login to your account or subscribe to our digital edition ($25 yearly). Prefer print? Order back issues or subscribe to our print edition ($30 yearly).
Links at archive.org don't show any more than that either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The rest is at https://getpocket.com/explore/item/falling
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So did you pay them $25 for a subscription, or was reading the first paragraph enough for you?Quote:
To read the full article online, please login to your account or subscribe to our digital edition ($25 yearly). Prefer print? Order back issues or subscribe to our print edition ($30 yearly).
Links at archive.org don't show any more than that either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Falling by William McPherson
"There are a lot of people like me, exiles from the middle class who suddenly find themselves on Grub Street."
Wanna know what happened to him next? McPherson, 84, died March 28, 2017, at a hospice center in Washington of complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181013052536/https://www.nytimes.com/201
7/03/29/books/william-mcpherson-dead-novelist-critic.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Reaganomics was quite open about the fact that the benefits of growth would come at the cost of some inequality. The idea was that the rich would benefit first but the poor would eventually benefit. This is the famous trickle-down theory, never better described than by Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who claimed this was what used to be called the “horse and sparrow” theory in the 1890s: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
Reaganomics holds that the work habits of the American people are tied irrevocably to their income, though in a curiously perverse way. The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more.
–
John Kenneth Galbraith. “Recession Economics.” New York Review of Books, February 4, 1982
www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/02/04/recession-economics/
https://web.archive.org/web/20180117212757/http://www.nybooks.com/arti
cles/1982/02/04/recession-economics/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.
Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.
Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Have you ever heard of the idea of a wage-slave? How do you keep a slave working? Since American employers can't actually beat their slaves, employers implicitly threaten them with starvation, homelessness, and death from no medical attention. But if healthcare was cheap or free from the government, healthcare could not be used to threaten wages-slaves in order to make them obey. I'm pretty sure the American Medical Association's agenda is to make the maximum amount of money and certainly NOT to help wage-slaves avoid punishment. The system is run to discover how much higher prices American wage-slaves can be tricked into paying compared to the rest of the world:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.
Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.
Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compa
re-countries/#item-relative-size-wealth-u-s-spends-disproportionate-amount-health
www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/072116/us-healthcare-co
sts-compared-other-countries.asp
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Before 2015, few people would have thought of not finishing college as a public-health issue. That changed because of research done by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton who are also married. For the past six years, they have been collaboratively researching an alarming long-term increase in what they call “deaths of despair” — suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism-related illnesses — among white non-Hispanic Americans without a bachelor’s degree in middle age.
Change any one of those attributes (race, nationality, education), and the trend disappears. Mortality has not increased among white Americans with a bachelor’s degree, nor American people of color, nor non-Americans without a bachelor’s degree. (Indeed, all-cause mortality among those groups has continued to go down, as usual.) Something about not having a bachelor’s degree in America, especially when white, can be deadly.
The term “deaths of despair” has taken on a life of its own, becoming ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and op-eds. It has been the subject of think-tank panels, conferences, and even government inquiry. “America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why,” proclaims a New York Times article that visualizes some of their research. This past fall, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee issued its own report on “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair.”
Case and Deaton’s new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press), takes their message even further. Capitalism itself, they argue, needs serious reform if it is to make good on its potential to improve the lives of all Americans. In particular, as Case pointedly observed in a lecture last year at Stanford University, "We don’t think American capitalism is working for people without a four-year college degree — and that’s two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64."
Since 1989, U.S. death certificates have collected information on the highest level of education attained by the deceased. Mortality from all causes among middle-aged white Americans appeared steady at first, but then, they realized, the fates of the more- and less-educated were actually diverging. When they separated the groups, they saw that white middle-aged college graduates’ mortality had dropped 40 percent from 1990 to 2017, while those without a college degree became 25 percent more likely to die in middle age. The result: By 2017, those who hadn’t finished or never went to a four-year college were four times as likely to die between age 45 and 54 as those who did.
Money alone, in the form of aid or wages, would not fix matters, although they did believe higher wages were a necessary step toward a remedy. Lack of social connections, a sense of purposelessness in one’s work, and doubt that the future would improve underlay the mortality trends. Unemployment, income inequality, and other ills might be part of that problem, but the center of their story had broadened into something like the slow unraveling of a way of life.
Case and Deaton argue in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism that capitalism requires serious reform if it is to make good on its potential to improve the lives of all Americans rather than just a privileged few. Education, particularly postsecondary education, plays an important, recurring role: Neither savior nor villain, it offers all manner of protections to those who have it, yet leaves behind those who don’t.
"The four-year college degree is increasingly dividing America," they write in the book. "A four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line."
Case and Deaton lament stagnant wages and lay much blame upon the American health-care industry — the book’s principal villain.
Health care soaks up money that could have gone to wages — near
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Have you ever heard of the idea of a wage-slave?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.
Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.
Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Yup.
Google my handle and "wage slave" and you'll probably see a lot of result here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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How American Politics Went Insane – June/July 2016 The Atlantic
Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.
The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.
Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.
And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.
No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.
Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.
Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.
Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or
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