White manual workers once expected that the American Dream would come true for them

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020

In 2015 life expectancy began falling for the first time since the height of the AIDS crisis in 1993:

The causes — mainly suicides, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses — claim roughly 190,000 lives each year.

The casualties are concentrated in the rusted-out factory towns and depressed rural areas left behind by globalization, automation, and downsizing, but as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton demonstrate in their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, they are also rampant in large cities. Those most vulnerable are distinguished not by where they live but by their race and level of education. Virtually the entire increase in mortality has been among white adults without bachelor’s degrees — some 70 percent of all whites. Blacks, Hispanics, college-educated whites, and Europeans also succumb to suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths, but at much lower rates that have risen little, if at all, over time.

The disparity is most stark in middle age. Since the early 1990s, the death rate for forty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old white Americans with a BA has fallen by 40 percent, but has risen by 25 percent for those without a BA. Although middle-aged blacks are still more likely to die than middle-aged whites, their mortality has also fallen by more than 30 percent since the early 1990s. Similar declines occurred among middle-aged French, Swedish, and British people over the same period.

[...]

White manual workers once expected that the American Dream would come true for them. In Kathryn Newman’s remarkably prescient study of downsizing, Falling from Grace (1988), older people recalled that Elizabeth, New Jersey — where 18 percent of residents now live in poverty — was once a “place of grandeur, where ladies and gentlemen in fine dress promenaded down the main avenue on Sunday.” The Singer Sewing Machine company employed over 10,000 workers, roughly a tenth of the city’s population. The company awarded scholarships to children, sponsored baseball games, and hosted dances and bar mitzvahs in its recreation hall. Each sewing machine had a label, and if returned with a defect, the man who’d made it would fix it himself.

The last American Singer plant closed decades ago, along with thousands of other factories. There were 19.5 million decently paying US manufacturing jobs in 1979, compared to around 12 million today, when the population is almost 50 percent larger.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    This is clearly attributable to the Open Borders/Free Trade policies we have been following for the last 40 years or. All of the economic growth over that period has been seized by the Ruling Class. In fact, since Working Class wages have fallen over that period, the Ruling Class has actually clawed income away from the workers. Middle Class income has also stagnated.

    Trump is a product of this hidden revolution. But the Ruling Class has pretty much neutralized him, so all the wars he promised to stop continue, and the Open Borders/Free Trade nonsense remains in place.

  2. Harry Jones says:

    How exactly does one seize economic growth? I’d like to try it.

    Because I have a general idea how a ruling class comes about, and I wouldn’t mind being in that august company myself.

  3. Huey Pierce Long, Jr. says:

    Capitalism is piracy.

    Listen and understand.

    You must become the pirate.

    BAPtize thyself.

  4. Harry Jones says:

    Well, shiver me timbers.

    When on earth, do as the earthlings do. When they steal from you, steal it back.

    Me, I have a clear conscience, for I have never taken anything that wasn’t first taken from me. But I do believe in trade. It’s what raised man out of the neolithic.

    Capitalism is using money instead of barter. It has its pitfalls to be sure, but it beats lugging a sheep around to pay your bills.

    Reciprocate both evil and good. Be no prisoner of society’s moral dilemmas.

  5. Sam J. says:

    Harry Jones says,”…How exactly does one seize economic growth?…”

    You flood the country with illegal aliens who work for half or less than the citizen workers and never complain because they are here illegally. You tax the citizens to provide hospitals, schools and other services to take care of them while lowering their wages. You also flood the country with refugees and immigrants which further reduce wages. You make sure there’s plenty of free trade agreements that only go one way. Importing into the US but the other countries have massive anti-US trade rules and tariffs so exports collapse.

    On the financial side you get together with your buddies who control the FED and the banking system and you buy all the stock in companies with hostile takeovers. You then slash wages if you don’t move all production out of the country all together. At the same time you loot the pension funds built up over the years. The big picture is to financialize everything then use your insider status to buy up all the productive business and squeeze the hell out of the workers. The Jews did this to the Germans before WWII, bankrupting the middle class, and they are doing it to the US and everyone else they can right now. If you’re in with the right people you can get vast amounts of capital for next to nothing. The (((guy))) who bought the World Trade Center complex before the Jews blew it up only put down a few million cash for the whole project then cashed out with billions from the insurance claims.

    Another fine financial scheme is to bet on radically unsafe bets in the financial business like the bundled housing mortgage bonds that you know to be fraudulent and then collect the profits AND get bailed out for trillions when the whole thing goes bust and you don’t spend a single day on jail. At worst you pay a fine far, far less than the profits.

    “…Capitalism is using money instead of barter. It has its pitfalls to be sure, but it beats lugging a sheep around to pay your bills…”

    That’s absurd. The Nazis had money so did the Commies. Were they “capitalistic” or did they lug around sheep????

    I’m not sure why but people are always giving us these stupid, ignorant choices like,”be capitalistic and have the elites rip you off and loot the whole wealth of the country OR pay for everything with sheep”. Do you think someone might think that was narrow minded, imbecilic and stupid that you feel that’s the only choice that can be made? Is that the limit of your imagination? Do you feel like anyone should be impressed with the knowledge of someone who thinks that our choices should be so constrained?

  6. Huey Pierce Long, Jr. says:

    “Capitalism is using money instead of barter.”

    Hahaha.

  7. Huey Pierce Long, Jr. says:

    Sam,

    Nice plan! Have you been in touch w/ the right stakeholders? Let me know how soon we can start executing on this vision.

    Best,

    Boss

  8. Harry Jones says:

    Huey, it seems to me you’re making the same mistake here as in your concerns about videoconferencing. The economy interprets corruption and excessive taxation as damage and routes around it.

  9. Sam J. says:

    “…Nice plan! Have you been in touch w/ the right stakeholders? Let me know how soon we can start executing on this vision…”

    Sorry we’re too late the Jews beat us to it. :(

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