Anatomists of Melancholy in the Age of Coronavirus
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
It was a massive social engineering experiment that backfired spectacularly.
Who had this belief? I have never in my life heard someone claim that economic insecurity leads to more marriages, more stable families, and less other risk taking.
Who exactly was doing this “social engineering experiment”?
My impression is rather that various corporate interests with influence in one major political party tried to cut down unions, labor laws, consumer protections, antitrust law, etc. as a way to save money and avoid legal liability, not really caring too much about the broader societal implications.
Alongside that, there was also a “tough on crime” movement, and lots of racist/nativist agitation, because fear is an effective way to drive votes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Full:
10 minute trailer/summary:
If someone wants to check out the above political aspect, fast forward to the 3 hour mark or so.
Fair warning, this would be typically filed under conspiracy theories / propaganda by most people, but even so, it is by far one of the most compelling ones I've seen. It very much advocates for the common man, and I believe makes a decent case. It certainly has had a major effect on the way I view how the world works, but YMMV.
This is a very vague description. Maybe you can provide some specific names and ideally some citations people directly making this argument? For instance, saying that less employment security would lead to more stable marriages?
I was a young child during the Bush I presidency, so I wasn’t really aware of philosophical debates among conservative “intellectuals” at the time, but my impression from afterward is that the (disingenuous) claim was always that getting rid of unions, privatizing infrastructure and institutions, halting antitrust enforcement, gutting labor laws, forcing welfare recipients to get jobs ASAP, etc. would spur innovation, help small businesses, grow the economy, and ultimately increase wages and wealth for average residents.
We deindustrialized in the 80s and 90s. The spike didn't start until 2000, just after OxyContin came out. That's your guy.
The war in Afghanistan played a large part in this. Where do you think all the poppies came from to start mass producing oxycontin?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
Not only prescription opioids but heroin became a big problem again right around the early 2000's.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-...
>Until a few years ago, most heroin came from an opium-producing region in Southeast Asia called the "golden triangle," a mountainous area of around 350,000 square kilometres overlapping Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
>Roughly 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report, released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs.
>Afghan heroin typically flows into Canada through two main trafficking arteries, Mr. Nadeau said: via the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then onto India and, finally, Canada; and, from Afghanistan to western Africa, then through the United States into Canada.
The one thing the Taliban was actually pretty good about was getting rid of the poppy fields.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
The cycle is: get hurt, get prescribed oxies. Either you or your kids or whoever gets addicted. The prescription runs out or you run out of money and you switch to heroin, which I can assure you, was widely available before the Afghan war. What makes it so deadly now is that it's frequently cut with Fent.
Fentanyl is far easier to smuggle because it's _so_ much more potent than other opiates. Buy a bunch of precursor from China, smuggle a few kilos over the southern border, bam.
In any case, the poppy supply was not the limiting factor on production of prescription opioids. There are two developments that have driven this crisis: prescription opioids and fentanyl.
The precursor is opium. Even synthetic opiates are derived from morphine, codeine and thebane directly extracted from poppies. In the case of oxycontin it's the thebane that's used. Thebane lacks the euphoric properties of morphine and makes you sick but is equally if not more addictive. Oxycontin is typically not smuggled across borders but sold by people with prescriptions. Everyone I know hooked on oxys buys them from the people with oxy prescriptions.
Fentynyl is cheap to produce and easy to smuggle in complete form. It's extremely potent and is extracted from unregulated fentynyl patches from China. These are stolen from hospitals etc, and are then processed to extract the fentynyl. This is then shipped on boats and such where it's easily concealed.
It ends up being cut into heroin or coke or some other drugs by local dealers to extend their supply. Suddenly that gram of heroin they sell is going to get someone high for 3 days instead of a few hours.
Most people od'ing on fentynyl aren't willingingly doing fentynyl, they're doing heroin or coke or something some asshole decided to cut with fentynyl.
Also I never claimed oxies were smuggled into the US, and I mentioned that people od because their heroin is spiked with Fent, so I'm not sure if you're trolling?
So, i've been trying to do some digging. It seems that this is the precursor to fentynyl
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/1-Benzyl-4-piperid...
According to these syntheses.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/fentanyl
Finding the precursor to N-Benzyl-4-piperidone was difficult but it seems to be partially this.
https://m.chemicalbook.com/ChemicalProductProperty_EN_CB9343...
Which is
https://www.spectrumchemical.com/OA_HTML/chemical-synonym_4-...
>is a derivative of piperidine used as an intermediate in manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals
Which comes from black pepper
Some advice: move away from the use of privilege as a rhetorical device. It's a useful concept but it is virtually impossible to tell someone that they're privileged without making things contentious.
> In an early 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia, suggested that "the ‘deaths of despair’ framing, while provocative, is unlikely to explain the main sources of the fatal drug epidemic." He continued: "The fatal overdose epidemic is likely to primarily reflect drug problems rather than deaths of despair." Case and Deaton responded that they had explicitly tested and rejected his hypothesis, and that in their work "despair" was meant to be "a label, not an explanation."
Is the issue that (white) people are getting past love and belonging, and getting stuck at Esteem?
Where people with degrees can work past this point? A restaurant worker will not be able to create a reputation/make a difference on the scale of a well paid or educated worker. Even if it's not the education that makes the difference, confidence is huge.
I'm sure it's what you meant, but I'd like to clarify that this is a feeling, not a fact. It's entirely possible for a restaurant worker to make a difference, just like it's entirely possible for a well paid and well educated worker to make no difference at all. (That's entirely setting aside the fact that what you do and the change you cause with your life is in no way determined by the job you're paid for.)
I think the point is that society tells our less well paid and well educated workers, explicitly and implicitly, that they are worth less and can contribute less, which is what gives rise to this feeling, but also why I think it's so important to clarify that it is a feeling and not a fact.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-jo...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/why-americans-...
Anti-intelletualism has always lead to bad outcomes really as a whole. There may even be toxic movements /within/ a given college culture but crucially there is always an element of self improvement there as a motivation. Even in the most degenerate stereotypical case of "learn nothing in four years to get the diploma for connections" they still have a goal even if they have latter regrets from doing things wrong.
The crab-bucket mentality often found within looks down upon those who do anything to try to make more of themselves as it makes them feel bad to see others try when they do not.
A third obvious ingredient is "lack of opportunity" which has synnergy with the first two - if they see opportunity but wind up in learned helplessness leaving it out of reach or fundamentally betraying who they are or degrading themselves. Combine the three and well it starts to become understandable how it becomes a fatal trap.
But minority groups show it isn't so simple. Given the evidence has throughly shown people are people the difference is likely that they tend to more often have or develop some sort of support network because they feel the world or authorities are aligned against them. Even the long cast out from born family LGBT members who were (and sadly often still are) societally strongly encouraged to keep it secret.
Sadly one outlier I am aware of are Native Americans who tend to have less than ideal situations with reservations to put it mildly. It might be a matter of magnitudes as well.
Of course even if the hypothesis is correct there is still a matter of how to address each variable of the systems.
There’s a book called “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” by Richard Hofstadter, which explores the history of this [0]. Useful talk on HN too [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
I'm reluctant to admit I'd probably be pretty biased myself without great care (and most people are busy with their own concerns and prob don't care)
Man, what's happening over there?
Opioids have few regulations on how much are prescribed. This ties in directly to the healthcare issue.
Private Prisons are run by using prisoners as workers for less than a dollar an hour. This is constitutionally legal. This means there is a financial incentive to imprison people.
Elections are influenced by corporate lobbying. The state works for businesses at least as much as it works for the people, but guess who gets first preference.
Healthcare is based on profit and not on saving lives. Self explanatory and this has been talked about countless times throughout the past 4 years.
Education I don't know much about.
I suspect it's not the college degree at all but money and people with college degrees make more money and have better opportunities on average.
The people of the Boomer, Xer generation were told to work hard and everything would work out.
When you find your body wrecked from 12 hour shifts, your employment opportunities limited and as a cherry on top labelled "deplorable" in the popular media, is it hard to see why older white Americans with less education might be depressed?
You don't need a PhD and a bowtie to figure this out.
These are sobering thoughts. To oversimplify, I feel we have sold off the blue-collar jobs to the lowest bidder nations and left nothing for, as the authors point out, "two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64."
There will be continued and perhaps a heightened social reckoning.
That said, conclusions are only as good as the data and methods used to produce them. If we looked our physical world and universe and neglected to include the influence of gravity we would reach conclusions that could be valid in that context yet not so if gravity is considered. It is important to understand this for any study, not just this one.
So, what’s the “gravity” missing from this study?
The erosion (or disappearance really) of the industrial base in the US (and other parts of the world).
The industrial base is where the people at the center of this study found employment, careers and the basis for a fulfilling family life. With that gone we have the reality rightly exposed by this study.
Yet, the solution isn’t more college degrees.
This virus has exposed a sad reality: That the industrial base in the west has been eroded down to the point where we can’t locally manufacture simple products like masks and gowns at scale. We can’t even manufacture the plastic vials, swabs, reagents and packaging for vital test kits at scale (just try to find somewhere where you can order a billion of these in the US or Europe).
That, as the world know now, is a formula for disaster. And that is where the solution to the problem exposed by this paper lies.
Put simply, the US and Europe need to invest heavily in taking back massive segments of the industrial base. This won’t be cheap, simple or fast, and yet I think everyone understands this must be done.
We don’t need more degrees, we need to recover a portion of the economy that has evaporated over the last fifty years.
The other missing elements in the study are: Europe and the rest of the world.
Europe is an obvious place to ask: Does the same demographic have the same problems?
The rest of the world is, in some way, the “placebo” for a study like this. The study says that non-US whites and other races in the US don’t seem to have this problem. The obvious question is: How do they do at their countries of origin?
The answers to these basic questions would help frame the results and perhaps reveal some of the issues in the US.
One of the questions I would ask is: What is the effect of the $15/hr minimum wage on this segment of society?
I visited a friend’s factory in Los Angeles yesterday. Massive place. Imagine a Home Depot full of every type of manufacturing equipment you can imagine.
We talked about why he can’t manufacture consumer goods in this factory. It came down to high minimum wage, high taxes and onerous regulatory burden. He could literally hire hundreds of people and make consumer goods at scale were it not for this framework that simple makes manufacturing of consumer goods at scale (include masks, gowns and test kits in that) in the US impossible.
I am not n necessarily talking about simple products here. Phones, computers, graphics cards, displays, computer mice, tablets, watches, printers, tv’s, microwave ovens, refrigerators, clothes washers, grass mowers, etc. I could go on forever. Walk into a Home Depot or Best Buy. We can’t make anything sold in those stores (except for some of the construction materials at Home Depot).
The problem isn’t the lack of college degrees. The problem isn’t even capitalism. The problem is a combination of failed international and domestic policies that allowed for the loss of a massive portion of the industrial base that employed tens of millions of people for decades.
We can fix this.
Clarification edit: Coercion in response to coercion is self-defense. If someone physically forced their way to your property, you have a right to defend yourself, and this should be enforced. We need some way make sure there's no coercion in the market.
I know because I lived through it. Games before steam and client-server based rpg's that were designed to trick gullible consumers to give up PC game ownership.
Many (most?) hardcore libertarians actually oppose intellectual property, because it's not justified under the reasoning used to justify normal property. If someone puts a gun to your head and steals your car, they're clearly using violence to force you to do something you don't want to do (give them your car). If someone downloads a copy of a game you published and shares it with their friends, they're not doing any violence against you or making you do something you don't want to do. They may be making it less likely for other people to pay you money for that game, but under that minimalistic libertarian framework nobody has the obligation to pay you for a game just because you made it.
I also know of some libertarians that do not oppose IP itself, but claim that any system to enforce (and definitely our current patents system) is worse than no system at all.
Otherwise if you want a house all you have to do is go bankrupt then pick an empty mansion.
But that would require coercion, since that person doesn't want to leave.
After all, if the person squatting on what you consider to be your property doesn't recognize your claim of ownership, it would seem that you pose a greater threat to them than they do to you, especially if you're trying to remove them from the property when they're not presenting an immediate threat of physical harm.
Just curious, have you ever been in a fight or had a gun pointed at you?
Are you seriously arguing for an economy where anyone can build a skyscraper out of any material?
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew0...
Free markets? Don't look too closely at what actually happens.
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew0...
Capitalism is not the absence of state intervention in the market. Capitalism is the system where one group of individuals owns businesses and other assets and lives off the profit generated by them, and a much larger group sells their labour to the first group, receiving wages in return.
Anatomists of Melancholy in the Age of Coronavirus
I see this everywhere on places like FB, Twitter and Reddit where people take a single sentence or two and blatantly disregard its most obvious intended meaning, instead focusing on the words alone, with no context. I'm assuming you're imagining faces from the "first world problems" meme, crying that they don't have a college degree. Where a simpler and more generous explanation would be that people without a college degree have little hope of advancement in much of the US, and are stuck in dead-end jobs just at the time these jobs are becoming more precarious and lower paying, with a small health crisis all that is needed to drive one into bankruptcy.
So I think we should interpret the most obvious intended meaning, "deadly despair that arises from the lack of opportunity and stability from not having a college degree", instead of making a lame non-joke joke.