Here are some national statistics that are both curious and scary: In 1992, the “deaths of despair” among adults aged 25 to 74 without a college degree were 38 per 100,000 people. This compares to a death rate — from suicide, a drug overdose or alcoholism — of 20 for those who did graduate from college.
A chart that tracks these two figures up to 2019 shows a huge change over the 27 years. In 2019, the despair death rate for college graduates was about 25 per 100,000 people — higher than the 1992 figure, but not by much. For those who didn’t finish college, however, the death rate had far more than doubled, to about 90.
“Despair, in other words, is rising six times as fast among the working class as it is in the white-collar world,” wrote Christopher Ingraham on his website TheWhyAxis@substack.com.
What’s going on? Ingraham’s source is a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, grimly titled, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair and Death.” In it, the authors note that today’s suicide rate is higher than it’s been since The Great Depression.
“Our story is one in which the economy has increasingly come to serve some, but not all, Americans, and where a central division is between those who do or do not have a four-year college degree,” Case and Deaton write.
“We see the increasing mortality and declining adult life expectancy of less-educated Americans not only as a catastrophe in its own right but as a powerful indicator that American society is not working for the majority of its population.”
Ingraham wrote that since 1980, wages adjusted for inflation have risen for people who have a college degree. But they have declined for everyone else, which means that when you include the impact of higher prices, these workers are earning less now than they did 40 years ago.
Ingraham blames this trend on what he calls an obsession by politicians of both parties to set policies that encourage lower costs. In his view, this is why taxes haven’t increased to pay for the rising demand of social services. It also is why wages and other benefits on the lower end of the economic ladder, such as sick time, have not kept pace with the rising cost of living.
There is probably some truth to this, although the rising federal budget deficits of the past two decades indicate that a lot more money — mostly borrowed — is being spent somewhere. Perhaps the trick is to make sure a larger portion of it goes toward social services such as mental health treatment and drug rehabilitation.
As for pay, the case for a higher minimum wage is being made not by legislation but by a shortage of workers who are not returning to relatively low-paying jobs — despite a rising demand for their services. Meanwhile, a majority of states have expanded Medicaid to improve health care for the working poor.
Ingraham’s thesis also excludes an obvious and significant contributor to the despair death rate: The insidious spread of heroin’s first cousins, hydrocodone and oxycodone, as legal prescription drugs. The non-college death rate had been rising steadily from 1992 through 2010, but it took off a decade ago, when opioids began to be widely prescribed.
Another possible contributor is the decline of the two-parent family. It’s hard enough for two people to raise children; asking one person to do it, especially on a limited income, would be a test of anyone’s limits.
In the end, however, this problem must be addressed. Ingraham is right when he observes, “Generally speaking, people don’t kill themselves, drink themselves to death or develop a lethal drug habit unless they are experiencing a huge amount of suffering in their lives.”
Jack Ryan is editor and publisher of the McComb Enterprise-Journal.
