Responding To "Why Are Middle-Aged Whites Dying?" On "The Weekly Sift"

Article Link

Quoting the article linked above:

In 1990, the death rate for American whites aged 45-54 (USW) was within the normal range of similarly aged people in comparable countries, and similar to the death rate for middle-aged American Hispanics (USH). In all the other countries, death rates continued their centuries-long trend of dropping, with USH tracking the United Kingdom rate almost perfectly. But starting in 1998, USW turns up.

A good summary of this new study is in The Atlantic. The upshot is that about half a million American whites are dead who would be alive if USW death rates had followed the downward track of other first-world countries. The effect seems concentrated in the less-educated classes, and the cause is a sudden jump in the rate of what are called “poisonings” — mainly deaths related to alcohol and drugs — as well as an increase in suicides and other causes related to not taking care of yourself. Atlantic concludes that middle-aged whites “are dying of despair”.

 My response:

The entire issue goes right back to income inequality derived from corporatism. It is harder to be successfully middle-class every year.

In addition, most corporate jobs are requiring longer and longer hours, longer commutes due to inner-city gentrification, and with ever-greater workloads after layer-upon-layer of layoffs in the past three decades, with the worst of it over the past 15 years.

I can attest to it first-hand, I saw it in my own industry, and nearly everyone I knew in every other industry I could imagine were reporting the same things: wave after wave of mergers/buyouts, each followed within months by layoffs.

I can't tell you how many offices I worked in Chicago, each with 15-20 desks, most with only one or 

three still in use.

The combination of abandoning anti-trust enforcement and adoption of pro-corporate trade agreements has made worker stress on the job and off a Made-In-The-USA product,  where few still exist.

Workers in union shops are barely protected from this. Those of us in non-union shops have been mercilessly abused. The vast majority of the US workforce has the employee equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome. 

They stay, because they see no way out. Once they pass the age of 50, it is triply-so. Age discrimination is never admitted, but constantly practiced.

I know this because I personally lived it. I know friends and former colleagues who are STILL living it. I know the rampant exhaustion and depression

The only way many can maintain any sense of pride or status is by pointing to those in even more dire circumstances than they are. It certainly doesn't come from a sense of having done "a good job" when the corporate rule is multi-tasking at all levels, and at all times.

Nowhere in the spreadsheet calculations of "efficiency experts" accounting for the time it takes to keep accurate records amidst constant interruptions. They do not take into account travel time between offices. They do not take into account combative competition in the multiple work requests coming in from multiple requestors in many different departments dispersed all over the globe. They do not take into account any variation from the "laboratory" conditions under which they observe tasks being done.

What we really need in this country is a mass exodus from corporate employment into entrepreneurial employment, which would shut down the corporate illusion factory. Couple that with technology-assisted barter...which I like to call "Techism."

What Bernie Sanders proposes will go a long way toward helping youth achieve a better future. It will help the environment. It will drive up economic activity and jobs, and it will solve many infrastructure issues. There are a lot of positives in Bernie's plan.

Still, it leaves the issues of corporate personhood and the abandonment of anti-trust investigation and enforcement. It also leaves the existing workforce with a form of PTSD on a national scale.

We have a long, long way to go in this country before any real respect for human values and needs like rest, exercise, and social bonds are respected in actual fact, and not just given lip service.

Globally, we also face the looming spectre of automation breathing down Labor's neck. There is no mechanism built into traditional Capitalism to deal with this. Everyone knows the robots are coming, yet few are talking about it. Capitalism only relates labor to money, and has no means built into it to provide for the needs of those who are displaced from work by automation as it will be in thirty years or so.

This is why I believe that we will need to have a global paradigm shift in the ways we use to allocate resources based on both human and societal needs.

The only answer that makes sense is something that I call "Techism," for lack of a better term. We need to use technology to track resource needs globally, and administer resource distribution. We need to remove money from the equation and base it on a hierarchal series of values:

1. Environmental sustainability.
2. Human needs and values.
3. Obsolescence due to technological improvement.

Capitalism as it currently stands both drives and hinders improvements in technology:

• Newer, smaller companies attempt to disrupt and displace their way into a competitive capitalist market.
• Older, established companies use every means possible to avoid being displaced and to wring every dime from existing capital infrastructure. 

 Clearly the latter players in this game have the money and resources to fight change through every means available. They clearly have financial incentive to do so.

The only way to speed newer and more sustainable technological adoption is to remove finance from the picture, and simply base re-tooling and technology adoption on testing for more successful resolution of a given engineering problem.

As for motivation, we need to culturally change what we see as status from the accumulation of wealth and material goods to the accomplishment of innovation.

We need to change the ground under society's collective feet, and we need to give the abused everywhere a reason for hope.

Bernie is the first step down that road, laying the first few paving stones...if he is not blocked by the same forces of capitalism that are abusing and blocking the potential of billions around the globe.

We have many psychoses in modern culture; Corporate capitalism drives most of them, and uses them to perpetuate itself.

With hope,

Dan