The Forces Driving Middle-Aged White Peoples ‘Deaths Of Despair’
Web Publication: NPR (WYPR 88.1 Baltimore), by Jessica Boddy
The tip of the iceberg
If a reader is inclined to political correctness, they might find the article title at least suspicious; that is, until the reader realizes that it was published by NPR. The crux of the article is that if you’re a middle-aged white male without a college degree, your prospects are rapidly diminishing, and as a group, self-inflicted causes of mortality are going up rapidly.
Millions of men in the reported segment will have jobs and keep them until retirement, but millions of others will not. The employed masks the depth of the problem of those unemployed. It will get far worse as factories, warehouses, and transportation continue to automate. The mantra up until now is ‘retrain’. As someone who has successfully done so, I have a message that needs to get out: Retraining is possible and needed, particularly on an individual level, but when viewed as a solution for millions of vocational dislocations, the traditional idea breaks down.
The assumed fix for no college degree is a college degree. Viewed in terms of the age of the learner, there is an effect of rapidly diminishing returns. A college education is like invested money, its real value accrues over time on a curve. Take time out of the equation and you have far less to work with than a comparable young person. A young person that losses work and goes to college in their 30’s can expect something close to a normal career. This is far less true for a worker in their forties or fifties. This does not constrain the potential for each individual – there are exceptions, but for the whole, this is the reality. Job councilors, recruiters, HR, etc. are not generally geared towards older re-educated prospects. Add to this, the cost of managing a college education, and the logistics of retraining, and the economic possibilities become far more problematic. At the end of the tunnel, the job market is not prepared either. Tech jobs for example, are leaving off shore as much as any manufacturing sector.
We’ll eventually be facing a major social crisis. Think about how large swaths of predominantly rural states will look with the social problems akin to modern Indian reservations. Viewing the middle-America opiod epidemic, its already here. Fixing this will take a lot of planning, but mostly, a lot more realism from government policy makers, colleges, and HR professionals. It will also be helpful to ditch the political correctness. Just sayin.