The new face of the discipline was on display when the AEA convened for its annual meetings in San Diego in early January. There were plenty of panels of the usual type on topics such as monetary policy, regulation, and economic growth. But there was an unmistakably different flavor to the proceedings this year. The sessions that put their mark on the proceedings and attracted the greatest attention were those that pushed the profession in new directions. There were more than a dozen sessions focusing on gender and diversity, including the headline Richard T. Ely lecture delivered by the University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand.
Woody Allen once worried about what you would get if you combine the head of a crab with the body of a social worker. I worry about what you get if you combine the scientific hubris of an economist with the ideology of a sociologist. Maybe this:
The AEA meetings took place against the backdrop of the publication of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s remarkable and poignant book Deaths of Despair, which was presented during a special panel. Case and Deaton’s research shows how a particular set of economic ideas privileging the “free market,” along with an obsession with material indicators such as aggregate productivity and GDP, have fueled an epidemic of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism among America’s working class. Capitalism is no longer delivering, and economics is, at the very least, complicit.
Actually, the book has a publication date of March 17, but I guess it is now fair game to discuss the review copy I received. I think that their analysis is flawed in important respects. I’ll link to my review when it appears.
The rise in deaths of despair is almost entirely a function of deaths from various drug overdoses. To fit the hypothesis, though, it needs to be proven that there is an increase in USE. At this point, this is taken entirely as a matter of faith. I have yet to see any data that indicate that use itself is up, just that deaths are up. According to the NSDUH, Clearly, to me at least, there is an epidemic of LETHALITY of drug use, not of the use itself. Between the use of more potent drugs, drug mixing, and drug contamination, it is trivially easy to show why the mortality of drug use on its own might increase in the absence of an increase in use. Contrary to common belief, the mortality rate from drug use is <1% per year per user; a doubling or tripling of that rate could be caused by subtle shift in quality or usage patterns, but would look like an "epidemic" to the uneducated (and sometimes educated) public.
Even if there was an increase in use – which doesn’t seems implausible – that hardly implicates free market ideas, associated policies, and ‘obsession’ with GDP growth and productivity as complicitly ‘fueling’ (i.e., ‘causing’, being mostly responsible for) those excess deaths.
Free market ideas – is there any bad thing for which they aren’t responsible? Is there anything good that they can’t or don’t destroy? Is there anyone who espouses them who isn’t openly or secretly an evil hater and/or corporate shill? Is there any news that can’t be spun to serve The Cause, by demonizing opponents into culpable scapegoats?
Capitalism is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the left – the hated fiend behind every bad thing that happens, has happened, or will happen.
On the right-wing internet, there is a satirical meme extending “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to the tendency to try to pin the blame for literally everything on him (and his secret army of white supremacists or whatever). “I bet you this is somehow Trump’s fault too” / “It’s all Trump’s fault” / “Now it’s Trump fault that XYZ too …” (for something that ought to be hilariously impossible to attribute to Trump, and which would rely on essentially superstitious notions of being able to use evil witchcraft to poison the social air with the fallout of vague statements that somehow influences people to do bad acts, among other things.
So, for example, when the crazy “Black Hebrew Israelites” – the last people you would expect to be influenced by Trump’s evil mind rays and dog-whistles – killed half a dozen people at that Jewish supermarket in New Jersey last month, the lefty twitter-sphere contemptibly leaped to attribute this to Trump’s being a barely closeted old-school Nazi and his encouragement of white supremacist anti-semitism … somehow.
Likewise, there is “Capitalism Derangement Syndrome”, which is, I think, part of what Kling’s use of ‘Sociology’ is really a euphemism for. (The other half of the equation is now Privileged Identity Derangement Syndrome).
The fact that some people are still free to espouse free market ideas without being ignored, downgraded in social status, hounded out of the economics professions, or just cancelled and excommunicated from polite society, is just intolerable and at fault for everything bad?
Did a new coronavirus mutation emerge in Wuhan? Capitalism to blame! Correction, Capitalists to blame! Oh, even better correction, free market advocates to blame!
Increase in use is not implausible, it just isn’t supported in the data AFAICT. But it is a necessary part of the “capitalism is causing despair” hypothesis, so these people’s feet need to be held to the fire on this one.
According to Reason, U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014. Deaths of despair include alcohol related deaths and suicides. The data on drug overdose deaths lacks detail, mostly because of the immense variation in toxicology data gathering and reporting.
There are many proxies that can and have been used for drug use including police confiscation reports and wastewater sampling. I have seen nothing in any dataset, as imperfect as they are, that warrants your level of skepticism, Trent.
I’m looking at our own governments surveys that do not show (to me) significant changes in the rates of the use of various drugs; survey data is imperfect, but probably the best there is.
Drug overdose deaths have increased have increased almost 5-fold. Does anybody seriously think the usage rates have increased anywhere near this much? Even two-fold?
I look forward to Kling’s review of “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”. I’ve read the preview of the book and could barely get through each paragraph without a great deal of eye rolling. Take Charles Murray’s “Bell Curve”/”Coming Apart” data, combine it with the Case and Deaton’s own deaths of despair data, then wrap it in an anti-capitalist narrative as if copious amounts of social justice kool-aid had just been consumed. I will be impressed if Kling can remain charitable in his review; I lack the required self-control.
No one seems to want to explain how this is peculiarly a ‘capitalism crisis.’ It’s clearly more of a general ‘rich country’ crisis. Opioid overdose has gone up even as labor markets have tightened, and this has happened in much of the developed world as well as the US. I guess capitalism is to blame in the sense that it is to blame for the fact that the US is so well-off materially, and socialism might help that by making us as poor as Mexico, where people can’t afford expensive drugs, but otherwise? The actual problem, a problem of prosperity, is that at a certain point, more prosperity, for certain segments of the population, gives them the means to destroy themselves, and we have to decide if we ought to be paternalistic and try to save them.
It’s pretty mind-boggling, though, how so many leftists have done the mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that the answer to opioids is increased regulation of labor markets and finance, that it’s the economics which has failed. If there is a ‘government solution’ isn’t it pretty obvious that it would be to crack down on the narcotics market?
“People are killing themselves with heroin, what should we do? Crack down on heroin trafficking? No way, crack down on derivatives trading, clearly!” I’m not saying I favor cracking down on illegal drug use, but if we take it for granted that that won’t work, then giving people money, nationalizing industries, or preventing them from getting pay day loans certainly won’t. Nor will giving them jobs, since as if that were the problem, the current labor market would’ve alleviated the problem.
Before you conclude that they’re wrong, you should read Lou Keep’s essay series “Uruk Machines”