death rates of white middle class American males

[SomeGuy]

NO, ERIC!! DOWN, BOY, DOWN!! 

[Eric the Green]

And other opinions to mine are good; we can all learn from each other, if we are willing.

[The Wonkette]

(02-27-2017, 01:17 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Blah, blah, blah...

Getting back to the topic of the thread for a second, here is an interesting article on the impact of manufacturing losses on marriage and fertility rates.

Quote:When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men
David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson
February 2017
Abstract
The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers or living in single-headed households. A potential contributor to both phenomena is the declining labor-market opportunities faced by males, which make them less valuable as marital partners. We exploit large scale, plausibly exogenous labor-demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the supply of young ‘marriageable’ males affect marriage, fertility and children’s living circumstances. Trade shocks to manufacturing industries have particularly negative impacts on the labor market prospects of men and degrade their marriage market value along multiple dimensions: diminishing their relative earnings—particularly at the lower segment of the distribution—reducing their physical availability in trade-impacted labor markets, and increasing their participation in risky and damaging behaviors. As predicted by a simple model of marital decision-making under uncertainty, we document that adverse shocks to the supply of ‘marriageable’ men reduce the prevalence of marriage and lower fertility but raise the fraction of children born to young and unwed mothers and living in in poor single-parent households. The falling marriage-market value of young men appears to be a quantitatively important contributor to the rising rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing and single-headed childrearing in the United States. …

William Julius Wilson figured that out back in the 1980s, in his studies of African American men in the inner city. Women like their men to be employed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Julius_Wilson

[SomeGuy]

Thanks again, Ms. Wonk.


In recent, stunning news: Social scientists prove something people have known all along. 

[SomeGuy]

You're what, 50-something?  How many times have you been married?

[The Wonkette]

(02-28-2017, 01:05 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Any prospective marriage partner, whether male or female, is sort of dumb to marry unless they want to possibly give up a substantial portion of cash flow. The only exceptions to this are cases where one is marrying "up." But if one's marriage couples one with a lesser earner, one will be making a financial sacrifice, one way or another.

I don't get your logic. Let's say you have two people making $40,000 a year, living in two separate households, paying rent or mortgage for their separate apartments, with two sets of furniture, etc... When they marry, they move into one dwelling. How does that not save money? Same goes for if one makes $50,000 and the other makes $30,000; both are still better off combining income and sharing a home.

Unless you are comparing tax rates of married couples versus cohabitating couples. That's another story...

Another factor is if children come into the picture. Yes, children are a big hit on one's finances.

[Ragnarök_62]

(03-03-2017, 07:03 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(03-03-2017, 05:56 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(02-28-2017, 01:05 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Any prospective marriage partner, whether male or female, is sort of dumb to marry unless they want to possibly give up a substantial portion of cash flow. The only exceptions to this are cases where one is marrying "up." But if one's marriage couples one with a lesser earner, one will be making a financial sacrifice, one way or another.

I don't get your logic.  Let's say you have two people making $40,000 a year, living in two separate households, paying rent or mortgage for their separate apartments, with two sets of furniture, etc...  When they marry, they move into one dwelling.  How does that not save money?  Same goes for if one makes $50,000 and the other makes $30,000; both are still better off combining income and sharing a home.

Unless you are comparing tax rates of married couples versus cohabitating couples.  That's another story...

Another factor is if children come into the picture.  Yes, children are a big hit on one's finances.

With the rate of divorce, no one in their right mind who is at risk of paying alimony should get married, unless they really, really, really dig the notion of marriage.

Agreed.   And, may I say,  the trade of sex for assorted weed/booze highs, that inanimate substances in lieu fleeting, scratch that itch , sex drive may well work in the favor post 1970's divorce enablers. Pocket pussies/Flesh lights/ uber alles!!!!   You  see, divorce for the possessors of the Y chromosome donate, regardless of prior X/Y pairings... OK, over and out... rags........  Sot weedery , along with variant weederies, give =, 1,2,JCL,  this sorta thinge.  Yeah,    profound , does, happen, when ya, find your own path to being at 1 with the ultimate God,   Universal Force of the Universe.   That entity put Eric's planets and left the riddle, that Eric may have now.  Stuff, like that, yeah. stuff. 

Hmmm....   How about tying the US dollar to a unit of K Joules ?   Set it to = 1 dollar = 1 K Joules. Now that we have that, here's how the money supply would work.
Any entity that contributes base load K Joules, is entitled to sell those as shares on the energy market. Also, any entity that contributes 1 KJ to fuel supplies may also issue futures.  So, now you get a market where producers, instead of the FED, can add currency in relation to the number of KJ's online. Also, if you're a household, thing will be such that the number of KJ's saved = money in the bank. So, that's say household has 20 , 19th century incandescent bulbs and borrows , X KJ's and buys whatever LED lights. Now... y'all s see how a JK backed currency would work. If any economic actor has a direct rationale for either demand reduction and/or add something to the grid   . Wrt to some current stuff. Since KJ's from current oil can be set to a negative number. You do this since you'd borrowed non native KJ's.
Fossil fuel JK's are mined and have a direct negative effect wrt climate change. Essentially , it's easy to  set a negative number, since stuff mined, isn't equal to carbon dioxide levels.  Meh... just call it pollution recapture , so... as to ... maintain...  market discipline is more vectors.

[pbrower2a]

(03-03-2017, 05:56 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(02-28-2017, 01:05 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Any prospective marriage partner, whether male or female, is sort of dumb to marry unless they want to possibly give up a substantial portion of cash flow. The only exceptions to this are cases where one is marrying "up." But if one's marriage couples one with a lesser earner, one will be making a financial sacrifice, one way or another.

I don't get your logic.  Let's say you have two people making $40,000 a year, living in two separate households, paying rent or mortgage for their separate apartments, with two sets of furniture, etc...  When they marry, they move into one dwelling.  How does that not save money?  Same goes for if one makes $50,000 and the other makes $30,000; both are still better off combining income and sharing a home.

Unless you are comparing tax rates of married couples versus cohabitating couples.  That's another story...

Another factor is if children come into the picture.  Yes, children are a big hit on one's finances.

...and sharing some household duties, driving, child care (if a blended marriage). Many entertainments from publications to cable TV are cheaper for two than for one, especially if the pair have some shared cultural and intellectual interests. (If they don't have those, then why are they marrying)? There comes a probable end to some expensive activities of singles, like night-clubbing. Down go the bar bills. Maybe one or the other gives up an expensive hobby that eats time and money.

Then there is

S-E-X

which is far safer and more reliable inside a marriage than outside a marriage.

[FLBones]

You should get married if you plan on having kids.

[pbrower2a]

(03-04-2017, 02:16 PM)FLBones Wrote: You should get married if you plan on having kids.

A reasonable assumption now. One parent is just not enough in this unforgiving world. But let us be reasonable enough to encourage people to contemplate the benefits and detriments of any particular marriage.

Now that same-sex marriage is now lawful in all States, nobody has that as an excuse.

[Eric the Green]

My comment: Trump "loves the poorly educated." The less educated are less informed, it seems, and thus were not able to discern which candidate would be on their side in 2016, and which was the con man who wasn't. They voted for style over substance.

‘Deaths of Despair’ Are Surging Among the White Working Class
by Jeanna Smialek
March 22, 2017, 9:01 PM PDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...generation

Outcomes are poised to worsen as the middle-aged fare badly

Deaton and Case expand on earlier findings about mortality

Researchers who sounded the alarm on increasing white working-class mortality blamed the trend Thursday on economic upheaval that created a web of social issues so tightly interwoven that even successful policies would take years to unsnarl them.

Mortality and morbidity, which measure chances of death or illness within an age group, began climbing in the late 1990s for less-educated whites between 45 and 54. That came as progress against heart disease and cancer slowed and drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholism -- so-called “deaths of despair” -- became pervasive.

Distress born of globalization and technological change probably drove the deadly outcome, new research by Princeton University’s Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton shows. Their findings point to a cycle of despair that’s deepening: Middle-aged whites today are more likely to report pain and mental-health problems than their predecessors and are experiencing symptoms of alcoholism at a younger age.

“Policies, even ones that successfully improve earnings and jobs, or redistribute income, will take many years to reverse the mortality and morbidity increase,” Case and Deaton write in their paper. “Those in midlife now are likely to do much worse in old age than those currently older than 65.”

Fatal Crossover

Less-educated whites are unique in their plight. Mortality has continued its long-run decline for whites with bachelor’s degrees, Hispanics and blacks. In 1999, the rate for whites between 50 and 54 with only high-school degrees was 30 percent lower than the mortality rate of blacks that age. By 2015, it was 30 percent higher, a cross-over echoed across age groups.

The problem bucks a global trend: Middle-aged mortality has been falling globally, even in other advanced economies like the U.K. Adult mortality improvements have been most striking in developing countries, according to United Nations data.

While high school-only Americans earn far less than peers with a bachelor’s degree -- about 60 cents on the dollar -- income inequality itself doesn’t seem to be the driver of white woe. Blacks and Hispanic Americans fare even worse economically, yet they’ve made consistent gains in combating mortality and morbidity. And in Europe and the U.K., where income divides have also widened, mortality has been declining across demographics.

In the eyes of Case and Deaton, a 2015 economics laureate for his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare, the decline is a story of cumulative disadvantage. While minorities have a long history of economic struggle, white Americans could once expect a secure job, family life and future with only a high-school degree. But unions, factories and mines began to decline in the 1970s, taking with them high-paying jobs.

Churches Fade

In response, college attendance increased. Those who didn’t go found themselves in lower-paying jobs or left the labor market entirely, pushing down participation for those with less than a bachelor’s degree.

As opportunities eroded, so did institutions that composed the backbone of middle-class existence. Traditional churches ceded ground to creeds that emphasize individualism -- as a result, people feel increased responsibility for their own successes or failures. Marriage became less common as men became less likely to work, leaving both genders with less stability.

“The story is rooted in the labor market, but involves many aspects of life, including health in childhood, marriage, child rearing, and religion,” the authors wrote.

Without their traditional moorings, whites increasingly turned to chemical crutches. Alcoholism worsened. Suicide climbed. And when doctors began to hand out opioid prescriptions more freely during the 1990s, addiction took root.

Narcotic Plague

These days, more Americans die from drug overdoses than car accidents -- the former killed about 47,000 people in 2015, while the latter fewer than 38,000. Opioids specifically killed 33,000 people in 2015, and the vast majority overdosing are white.

“Although we do not see the supply of opioids as a fundamental factor, the prescription of opioids for chronic pain added fuel to the flames,” Deaton and Case wrote. “Controlling opioids is an obvious priority, as is trying to counter the negative effects of a poor labor market on marriage, perhaps through better safety nets for mothers with children.”

Case and Deaton’s story chimes with America’s recent politics. President Donald Trump did far better than Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, in counties with higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality, according to research by Pennsylvania State University assistant professor Shannon Monnat.

“Much of the relationship between mortality and Trump’s performance is explained by economic factors; counties with higher economic distress and larger working-class presence also have higher mortality rates and came out strongly for Trump,” Monnat wrote. “In many of the counties where Trump did the best, economic precarity has been building and social and family networks have been breaking down for several decades.”

[The Wonkette]

Back to topic.  The information on rising death rates for middle-aged whites is more nuanced.  From today's Slate magazine.

Quote:“The white working class is really struggling.” This statement has been assumed as a fact and used as an explanation to rationalize Donald Trump’s upset election. Is it true?

One major data point feeding into the narrative of the struggle is the purported increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white people in America. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton noticed a bit over a year ago in a paper that received much well-deserved attention, other countries and U.S. nonwhites have seen large declines in death rates, something like 20 percent. That finding was certainly true—but what received far more attention was their secondary point, that American middle-aged whites were not experiencing these same declines and, in fact, faced an increasing mortality rate.

As we’ve explained before, this is not quite correct: What seems to be happening is that non-Hispanic white women, aged 45–54, are experiencing an increase in mortality, and everyone else seems to keep making gains.

The full article can be found here.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and...eally.html

[pbrower2a]

Could it be that some hard-hit populations are in Appalachia and the Ozarks, places that I call the "Mountain South"? These areas have some horrid demographics, and they put the lie to any contention of 'white superiority' because most of them are lily-white.

These areas have not attracted many large-scale investments in plant and equipment, and the coal mining that used to be the mainstay of some local economies is becoming mechanized (thus fewer workers) if the coal mines aren't played out.

Educational achievement is low in those parts, and for ill-educated people there just aren't the jobs that there used to be. Fast food? Copious cheap labor means nothing if there are few customers. Fast food is heavily a suburban phenomenon.

I'm guessing that to get away from the economic pathologies of the Mountain South one must leave the Mountain South for, most likely, cities on or near its fringe -- like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Dallas, or Atlanta. But that implies going to a very different world.

What might be middle-aged for a white-collar worker is old for someone with black-lung disease... let alone the many nagging injuries associated with the hard, heavy work that is mining. (See also loggers). Note that loggers in the Pacific Northwest also (at least statistically) seem to have much the same rate of opiate abuse as coal miners.

Being on opiates is not good. But neither is having the aches and pains that opiates or booze mask.

[Eric the Green]

The trend seems to be larger than could be explained by what's happening in a small part of the country like mountain Appalachia/South alone.

[Ragnarök_62]

(03-30-2017, 11:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The trend seems to be larger than could be explained by what's happening in a small part of the country like mountain Appalachia/South alone.

Eric, If you remember the Strauss/Howe prophecy, yes, it make all of the sense in the world.  We late 1950's/early 1960's cohorts have all sorts of social pathologies. We'll never outgrow that. It is no surprise that mid life social pathologies are pretty much a life long pattern.   I'd guess that isn't confined to geography.

[pbrower2a]

(03-30-2017, 11:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The trend seems to be larger than could be explained by what's happening in a small part of the country like mountain Appalachia/South alone.

True. But it would seem heavily concentrated in areas in which manufacturing and resource-extraction have become less reliable places of employment.

Say what you want about the factory, but it was long the first step out of poverty. People needed little intellectual refinement to do the work -- just a healthy body and a good work ethic. With a strong union one could get good pay for machine-paced work.

As the manufacturing of material objects and the extraction of raw materials become less important in the economy, so does the intrinsic value of the work. There aren't as many jobs in those activities, so someone starting out in Kentucky or West Virginia is more likely to work in a store than a mine -- even if one has a healthy body and a strong work ethic.

[Warren Dew]

(03-03-2017, 05:56 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(02-28-2017, 01:05 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Any prospective marriage partner, whether male or female, is sort of dumb to marry unless they want to possibly give up a substantial portion of cash flow. The only exceptions to this are cases where one is marrying "up." But if one's marriage couples one with a lesser earner, one will be making a financial sacrifice, one way or another.

I don't get your logic.  Let's say you have two people making $40,000 a year, living in two separate households, paying rent or mortgage for their separate apartments, with two sets of furniture, etc...  When they marry, they move into one dwelling.  How does that not save money?  Same goes for if one makes $50,000 and the other makes $30,000; both are still better off combining income and sharing a home.

They can save the same money by moving in together without getting married - or by living with roommates who aren't each other, for that matter.