These are in part diseases of despair. Life sux. Billboard musicians have it tattooed on their faces. Neo-liberalism has failed. Decades of the people in power treating the American public just as...
Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease ... obesity
These are in part diseases of despair. Life sux. Billboard musicians have it tattooed on their faces.
Neo-liberalism has failed.
Decades of the people in power treating the American public just as "voters" and "consumers" have taken their toll. To them we are just lines on spreadsheets to be parsed and prodded to elicit compliance. No wonder people are miserable. We have ceded willingly or unwillingly all the power over our futures to people who treats us like variables in algorithms to be optimized.
This article is full of it. Does it interview a family member of someone who OD'd or killed themself? Someone who experiences despair? No. It interview intellectual elites from Dartmouth and the University of Chicago.
The findings are sure to fuel political debates
Among whom? It's obvious to those of us who live lives of toil and want. Exactly who is debating this? The elites have failed. Anyone still pondering this matter has shown their hand. "I wonder why the peasants are so sad. Better read another McKinsey report."
Maybe if these people left their yuppie enclaves and started working the beat the espouse to study a la Studs Terkel they would not be so confused.
This is why Bernie polls so well in Trump territory. They both used a lot of anti-establishment rhetoric. Trump's answers were just, as you pointed out, oversimplified and/or scapegoats directed...
I think that this shows that Democrats need to present a positive message to appeal to these folks and show how they are going to actually address these systemic issues.
This is why Bernie polls so well in Trump territory. They both used a lot of anti-establishment rhetoric. Trump's answers were just, as you pointed out, oversimplified and/or scapegoats directed at social minorities.
Trump's campaign strategy was to use Bernie's economic populism (among... ahem... other things) and spread it with a nativist tinge to appeal the to existing """Freedom""" Caucus built by the Tea Partiers.
There's much talk about in the Dem establishment and corporate media-outlets appealing to swing voters. But economic populism never gets brought up. I think this is part because the economic establishment has to be working for you pretty damn well if you're a party elite or a mass media editor/talking
This spells out why a Joe Biden 2020 general election would be a disaster. In addition to being one of non-Bernie candidates currently not organizing a movement, he is a economic status quo guy. If the Dems run anyone but the "stick it the billionaires" guy they will lose. As for Warren, maybe "big structural Bailey" will resonate but the whole identifying as Native American in 86 thing is a liability. So idk.
Anyone else will run on "we need to protect the system from Trump" when what they really need to run on is "The system is fucked. Trump is fucked. Let's make big changes."
I think the Democrats have seen the writing on the wall about Biden, because I've started seeing a lot of push for Bloomberg lately. Unfortunately, I feel less certain about Bloomberg than Biden....
This spells out why a Joe Biden 2020 general election would be a disaster.
I think the Democrats have seen the writing on the wall about Biden, because I've started seeing a lot of push for Bloomberg lately. Unfortunately, I feel less certain about Bloomberg than Biden. I have this intense fear that the Democrats won't be able to get over themselves, and will try to block Bernie again. It scares me because if they disenfranchise liberal voters like last time, I know it's going to end badly, and I don't want 4 more years of Trump.
I am 100% certain that Bloomberg is being sold to the base by the media. The mainstream, centrist/center-right media outlets are doing everything they can to stop Bernie, again. It's obvious why...
Bloomberg
I am 100% certain that Bloomberg is being sold to the base by the media. The mainstream, centrist/center-right media outlets are doing everything they can to stop Bernie, again. It's obvious why they would rather have a ratings hog and crook in office than a progressive. It's too bad people still watch cable and network news.
The push is on cable and other ad spots. No one I've talked to is actually a fan of him, but it's obvious there's a lot of money being thrown behind him.
The push is on cable and other ad spots. No one I've talked to is actually a fan of him, but it's obvious there's a lot of money being thrown behind him.
Sorry I should clarify, polling well against Trump in hypothetical general election. I'm also not saying he is the only one polling well - just that he polls well compared to say, mayo Pete or Yang.
Sorry I should clarify, polling well against Trump in hypothetical general election. I'm also not saying he is the only one polling well - just that he polls well compared to say, mayo Pete or Yang.
Not quite. The disaffected people simply don’t vote at all. Donald Trump’s base is mostly fairly well off despite having lower education levels. Think professions like plumbing. They’re doing fine.
On the political debate side, these are the exact demographic that constitute Donald Trump's base.
Not quite. The disaffected people simply don’t vote at all. Donald Trump’s base is mostly fairly well off despite having lower education levels. Think professions like plumbing. They’re doing fine.
Yeah, about Trump's base at least. It's actually hard to separate out various factors since income is covariate with age and education, but Clinton won the actual working class vote pretty...
White over $50,000: Analysts have frequently noted that the median Trump voter wasn’t poor. Many low-income whites didn’t vote; wealthier whites who would benefit from Trump’s tax cuts were more likely to turn out. Here, I analyze whites earning more than $50,000, a reasonable cut-off for non-poor in most states.
It's actually hard to separate out various factors since income is covariate with age and education, but Clinton won the actual working class vote pretty decisively.
As for disaffected people not voting that one is harder to find because it's really hard to get great individual level survey data on voting habits. Almost everything you find is county or precinct level, which can't really do the kind of analysis we'd need. So we more need to rely on anecdotes and mine are mostly informed by experiences phone-banking and seeing patterns in what sorts of people were receptive or not.
What's different about California? It and Wyoming were the only states with no increase in "midlife mortality rates", and while Wyoming could perhaps be written off as a statistical fluke or a...
What's different about California? It and Wyoming were the only states with no increase in "midlife mortality rates", and while Wyoming could perhaps be written off as a statistical fluke or a special case, California is a large and diverse (by any measure) state with a population comparable to countries like Canada or Argentina. The article offers some hints
About a third of the estimated 33,000 “excess deaths” that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana...
but even outside of the hardest hit areas the map shows problems across the country. Interestingly, this doesn't seem to be a "red-state blue-state" problem that could be explained away by differences in progressive/regressive local politics. Some left-leaning states in the north-east are hit particularly hard and traditionally conservative states like Texas and Georgia are doing relatively well.
“Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones,” Woolf said. Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”
...
“There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” [Meara] said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”
Sounds like a closer look at the data is needed. Much of the article hints at economic distress but there's a lot of speculation too. And, even if the root cause is economic, how does that interact with other factors like drug policy or the food industry considering that opioid use and obesity are implicated?
For comparison I was wondering what trends in life expectancy look like here in Canada. According to this article from Statistics Canada (May, 2019) life expectancy did not increase from 2016 to 2017, "a first in over four decades". However, the article places the blame squarely on drug deaths (especially in young men, but also women) which were associated mainly with the opioid crisis and which most heavily affected BC and to an extent Alberta. As the article put it:
Increases in life expectancy in four provinces are largely offset by a marked decline in British Columbia... Although older men are living longer, the increase in deaths among young men almost completely offset these gains. A similar pattern occurred among women, although to a lesser extent... While developments in treatments for cancer, circulatory disease and other causes of death led to improvements in life expectancy, these gains were offset by losses in life expectancy from other causes. In particular, the drug overdose crisis occurring in Canada was a major contributing factor in the changes seen in life expectancy from 2016 to 2017... Of all accidental drug poisoning deaths, opioid-related deaths are responsible for a large share of the loss of life expectancy in Canada in 2017...
Alberta's income is heavily tied to the price of oil. Pretty much the only things going for the province are farming/ranching and oil extraction/refining. When oil really starts to swing downwards...
Alberta's income is heavily tied to the price of oil. Pretty much the only things going for the province are farming/ranching and oil extraction/refining. When oil really starts to swing downwards with increased pressure to swap to alternatives, I expect there be a lot of very disgruntled people there. Many have grown accustomed to the prosperity the oil industry has brought in the past decade or so. High paying jobs straight out of high school ($40+ an hour) is fairly common. Lots of jacked up trucks and expensive houses in oil towns. Those places are poised to be hard hit by shifting off of oil.
When I visit I still see a lot of oil money, which means most of the commercial industry there relies on that part of the economy. Beyond farming and ranching, there isn't much there, at least...
When I visit I still see a lot of oil money, which means most of the commercial industry there relies on that part of the economy. Beyond farming and ranching, there isn't much there, at least outside of the main metropolitan areas. Forestry, fishing, mining, and oil and gas extraction is 28% of Alberta's economy. The trend is only going to go down as demand falls with pushes towards greener technology.
Life expectancy is down, as is birth rate. It's almost as if the newer generation doesn't feel like life is worthwhile to live any more. I wonder why? /s
Life expectancy is down, as is birth rate. It's almost as if the newer generation doesn't feel like life is worthwhile to live any more.
These are in part diseases of despair. Life sux. Billboard musicians have it tattooed on their faces.
Neo-liberalism has failed.
Decades of the people in power treating the American public just as "voters" and "consumers" have taken their toll. To them we are just lines on spreadsheets to be parsed and prodded to elicit compliance. No wonder people are miserable. We have ceded willingly or unwillingly all the power over our futures to people who treats us like variables in algorithms to be optimized.
This article is full of it. Does it interview a family member of someone who OD'd or killed themself? Someone who experiences despair? No. It interview intellectual elites from Dartmouth and the University of Chicago.
Among whom? It's obvious to those of us who live lives of toil and want. Exactly who is debating this? The elites have failed. Anyone still pondering this matter has shown their hand. "I wonder why the peasants are so sad. Better read another McKinsey report."
Maybe if these people left their yuppie enclaves and started working the beat the espouse to study a la Studs Terkel they would not be so confused.
For that, you can click on “label” for the comment and use “Exemplary”
As long as your account is at least a week old, that is. The label feature doesn't show up for the first week.
Thanks much! I do my best to keep tildes high quality. Your message means a great deal to me :)
This is why Bernie polls so well in Trump territory. They both used a lot of anti-establishment rhetoric. Trump's answers were just, as you pointed out, oversimplified and/or scapegoats directed at social minorities.
Trump's campaign strategy was to use Bernie's economic populism (among... ahem... other things) and spread it with a nativist tinge to appeal the to existing """Freedom""" Caucus built by the Tea Partiers.
There's much talk about in the Dem establishment and corporate media-outlets appealing to swing voters. But economic populism never gets brought up. I think this is part because the economic establishment has to be working for you pretty damn well if you're a party elite or a mass media editor/talking
This spells out why a Joe Biden 2020 general election would be a disaster. In addition to being one of non-Bernie candidates currently not organizing a movement, he is a economic status quo guy. If the Dems run anyone but the "stick it the billionaires" guy they will lose. As for Warren, maybe "big structural Bailey" will resonate but the whole identifying as Native American in 86 thing is a liability. So idk.
Anyone else will run on "we need to protect the system from Trump" when what they really need to run on is "The system is fucked. Trump is fucked. Let's make big changes."
I think the Democrats have seen the writing on the wall about Biden, because I've started seeing a lot of push for Bloomberg lately. Unfortunately, I feel less certain about Bloomberg than Biden. I have this intense fear that the Democrats won't be able to get over themselves, and will try to block Bernie again. It scares me because if they disenfranchise liberal voters like last time, I know it's going to end badly, and I don't want 4 more years of Trump.
I am 100% certain that Bloomberg is being sold to the base by the media. The mainstream, centrist/center-right media outlets are doing everything they can to stop Bernie, again. It's obvious why they would rather have a ratings hog and crook in office than a progressive. It's too bad people still watch cable and network news.
The push is on cable and other ad spots. No one I've talked to is actually a fan of him, but it's obvious there's a lot of money being thrown behind him.
Sorry I should clarify, polling well against Trump in hypothetical general election. I'm also not saying he is the only one polling well - just that he polls well compared to say, mayo Pete or Yang.
Not quite. The disaffected people simply don’t vote at all. Donald Trump’s base is mostly fairly well off despite having lower education levels. Think professions like plumbing. They’re doing fine.
Yeah, about Trump's base at least.
It's actually hard to separate out various factors since income is covariate with age and education, but Clinton won the actual working class vote pretty decisively.
As for disaffected people not voting that one is harder to find because it's really hard to get great individual level survey data on voting habits. Almost everything you find is county or precinct level, which can't really do the kind of analysis we'd need. So we more need to rely on anecdotes and mine are mostly informed by experiences phone-banking and seeing patterns in what sorts of people were receptive or not.
What's different about California? It and Wyoming were the only states with no increase in "midlife mortality rates", and while Wyoming could perhaps be written off as a statistical fluke or a special case, California is a large and diverse (by any measure) state with a population comparable to countries like Canada or Argentina. The article offers some hints
but even outside of the hardest hit areas the map shows problems across the country. Interestingly, this doesn't seem to be a "red-state blue-state" problem that could be explained away by differences in progressive/regressive local politics. Some left-leaning states in the north-east are hit particularly hard and traditionally conservative states like Texas and Georgia are doing relatively well.
Sounds like a closer look at the data is needed. Much of the article hints at economic distress but there's a lot of speculation too. And, even if the root cause is economic, how does that interact with other factors like drug policy or the food industry considering that opioid use and obesity are implicated?
For comparison I was wondering what trends in life expectancy look like here in Canada. According to this article from Statistics Canada (May, 2019) life expectancy did not increase from 2016 to 2017, "a first in over four decades". However, the article places the blame squarely on drug deaths (especially in young men, but also women) which were associated mainly with the opioid crisis and which most heavily affected BC and to an extent Alberta. As the article put it:
Alberta's income is heavily tied to the price of oil. Pretty much the only things going for the province are farming/ranching and oil extraction/refining. When oil really starts to swing downwards with increased pressure to swap to alternatives, I expect there be a lot of very disgruntled people there. Many have grown accustomed to the prosperity the oil industry has brought in the past decade or so. High paying jobs straight out of high school ($40+ an hour) is fairly common. Lots of jacked up trucks and expensive houses in oil towns. Those places are poised to be hard hit by shifting off of oil.
I'm thinking when refineries actually close and people are forced to move out of those towns.
When I visit I still see a lot of oil money, which means most of the commercial industry there relies on that part of the economy. Beyond farming and ranching, there isn't much there, at least outside of the main metropolitan areas. Forestry, fishing, mining, and oil and gas extraction is 28% of Alberta's economy. The trend is only going to go down as demand falls with pushes towards greener technology.
Life expectancy is down, as is birth rate. It's almost as if the newer generation doesn't feel like life is worthwhile to live any more.
I wonder why? /s