Mel Evans/AP Photo
A boarded-up building in Camden, New Jersey, in 2011
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
By Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Princeton University Press
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Knopf
It is easy to get lost in the frustration of navigating a demanding career as a well-educated professional. The absurd cost of college, the low-paying internships and adjunct positions that have to be navigated, and the out-of-reach real estate prices in the few neighborhoods close to those jobs can erase any thoughts of privilege.
For much of America these problems are luxuries, because they come with expectations of something better, and a feeling that someone will listen to you. You might be on the lowest rung of a ladder, but you are on the “right” ladder, and with enough hard work and enough complaining, you can move higher or change things.
Go outside the handful of neighborhoods where professionals cluster, and their problems will immediately seem small. Go to Gary, Indiana, and see street after street of boarded-up homes, abandoned after factories closed. Those who couldn’t leave, almost all black, now live in perpetual decline. Go to Wheeling, West Virginia, and see empty lots of discarded needles, thrown away by people numbing their pain.
In these communities, people are not on the right ladder. Hard work isn’t going to move them higher. Their complaints won’t be published in a New York Times op-ed, and won’t generate thoughtful discussion. Instead they will often be dismissed as the lazy, dumb, racist, or angry ramblings of someone who doesn’t know their place.
The pitfall of quantitative analysis from afar is that the people impacted become data to understand, not people to listen to and learn from.
You don’t have to go far to see people stuck on this ladder. You don’t have to leave the Acela corridor, you just have to get off the Acela. The pain and despair that fills so much of America fills large parts of Bridgeport, Baltimore, and New York City. Hunts Point in the Bronx, just miles from some of the country’s most elite colleges, has a shooting gallery on a bridge above the train tracks. Every few hours, a group of homeless addicts, done injecting themselves with heroin, laugh or throw garbage at the Acela passing yards beneath them.
Two new books, one by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the other by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, focus on the pain of those stuck on the bad ladder. Each is an example of the two narrow ways well-intentioned elites deal with less-successful people: As a thing to be studied, or a thing to be pitied. It is hard not to come away from reading both books and realize it is better to be studied than pitied.
Case and Deaton, both economics professors at Princeton, have rightfully received praise for their research into America’s pockets of socioeconomic depravity, so bad that people are dying at alarming rates of what they have called “deaths of despair.” Their new book tries to further contextualize this epidemic sweeping through working-class America by rightfully placing it in the larger framework of a failed meritocratic system, showing that the deaths are a canary in the coal mine pointing to much deeper societal problems.
While this should be common sense to most people, Case and Deaton approach the problem by making the type of argument that can convince academics of its seriousness: with quantitative national data. And they bring the data. Lots of it.
The first part of the book illustrates the strength of that approach by placing our current problems in historical and economic context. They show how our country’s industrial shift, like offshoring factories to whichever country has the least regard for human, labor, and environmental standards, has crushed one group of Americans while enriching another, producing a gap.
This gap spans across race, with white, black, and Hispanic working classes all facing despair. While well-educated Americans benefit from free trade and more open borders, the rest of the country is either stagnating or declining.
For waking up academics and elites, especially their fellow economists who have aggressively supported offshoring, the book deserves to be applauded and awarded the awards academics give each other. They have done a little bit of the Lord’s work, and certainly a lot of the dean’s work.
But the later sections would have benefited from some physical boots on the ground in places that are suffering. The pitfall of quantitative analysis from afar is that the people impacted individually lose their voice and collectively their agency. They risk becoming data to understand, not people to listen to and learn from, making it harder to understand why they might do things that better-educated readers and researchers wouldn’t.
Case and Deaton are good enough scholars to understand this potential pitfall, so they fill in the quantitative data with data from interviews. This helps them to realize being stuck on the wrong ladder doesn’t just result in people killing themselves or turning to drugs, but also in a lower quality of life, earnings, family stability, and community. They are also astute enough to see how things other than money and jobs matter, such as religion, place, and family.
This is a wonderful first step, but it can’t replicate spending years in a neighborhood where you are woken up nightly by sirens, or a desperate knock from a neighbor whose son just OD’d, or the police investigating a killing out front. It is one thing to see the data turn south; it is another to see at a visceral level why someone might make what looks like a reckless choice. People in these communities deal daily with friends, relatives, and others who have lost their job, their home, their family, and have nobody to complain to.
While a good job is essential and a more robust health care and social safety net helpful, large parts of America have lost a sense of stability and purpose. The ladder they are on has one rung. That rung is shaky, and they know it. Their parents used to climb that ladder, moving from part-time jobs in high school to a factory job that enabled them to buy a home, marry their sweetheart, build a family, go to church, join a softball league, and then watch their children and grandchildren do the same thing. That ladder didn’t require college. It didn’t require getting into a résumé arms race with your neighbor, and certainly not a bunch of people 8,000 miles away.
Now that ladder is broken, and the people who left town, who went off to Princeton or Yale, climb a ladder that goes into the stratosphere. Many of them look down at the people they left behind and sneer, or laugh, or express pity, if they bother to look down at all. It is humiliating and strips people of their dignity.
A windfall of targeted programs and expanded empowerment zones and a greater social safety net, while helpful, won’t solve this problem. The two ladders are the problem. People who are on the “bad” ladder are not there only because they didn’t have the right opportunities. Many of them didn’t want to go to college. It’s not their thing, it isn’t what they value. They have different priorities, ones that put a premium on faith, place, and family.
Understanding that is hard when you are in academia. Case and Deaton have a high hill to climb, and I deeply respect them for taking this trek—though I am not sure they have gotten to the top of the hill yet.
KRISTOF AND WUDUNN come from another elite institution, the editorial page of The New York Times. In their new book, Tightrope, they approach the problem of “deaths of despair” in classic op-ed page style. They want the reader to know they have empathy and that the reader should too.
They also want the reader to feel better about themselves after reading this book, so in grand absolving fashion, they offer up ten actionable ways “to help in the next 10 minutes.” It feels like the equivalent of a yellow donation “wristband,” to allow you to do your part and then move on, complete with the obligatory endorsement by Bono.
The list includes some admirable advice, such as volunteering in a homeless shelter. And then there’s Tip 10: “As we were working on this book, our cherry orchard on the Kristof farm in Yamhill needed to be replaced, so after seeing the need for jobs in the area, we decided to plant the land with cider apples and wine grapes. Cider and pinot noir will employ more local people than other uses of the land, and we’ve already hired a couple of local people with troubled histories to clear the land.”
This isn’t a bad thing at all. We all could use more empathy, understanding, and be open to working with people “with troubled histories.” Maybe not just as the hired help, though.
Throughout the book there is a noblesse oblige attitude; not the old country club type, but an updated version steeped in well-to-do educated leftist language. Again, that isn’t a bad thing by itself, but here it too often comes with an uncomfortable savior vibe.
Kristof and WuDunn are hard-working journalists dedicated to their task, so they do put boots on the ground to get beyond the data, traveling to working-class communities in the U.S. for interviews, particularly Kristof’s Yamhill, Oregon, hometown, where his family farm is located.
Despite this hard work and genuine empathy, the authors can’t break out of their worldview. They can’t get beyond wanting to get people on the good ladder, and not dismantle the system of two ladders. They don’t emphasize devaluing the meritocracy, as Case and Deaton do, but rather take on the easier feel-good task of figuring out how to get talented young people on their preferred path. Or to use their metaphor, have access to the escalator, so they can escape.
Their top two policy suggestions are about getting people started on that ladder early. Number one is “High-quality early childhood programs,” and two, “Universal high-school graduation.”
When they tell the story of Ann Curry (now a famous journalist), who overcomes her past by making it to the top, they write: “America holds itself back when so much talent is left on the table … a nudge can make all the difference … to make it easier for young people to achieve their potential.”
But potential here is so narrowly defined. It is about the résumé arms race, about getting gold stars in elementary school, valedictorian status in high school, then leaving your town behind for a good college and maybe even The New York Times.
In the end, Kristof and WuDunn hold up their ladder as the solution, not the problem. They insist that working-class kids leave behind their former lives, give up their worldview, and become educated. All with guidance, help, and enlightenment from America’s new noble class.
This book rises above this attitude at times, with glimmers that the authors recognize there is more to the story, that they and all of the well-intentioned nonprofits funded by billionaires are part of the problem. Between the editorializing, it gives readers glimpses into how the other half live, allowing them to come to their own conclusion.
Yet in the end, it sits in a genre that is at worst condescending, and at the very worst a form of colonialism. The choices are: Climb my ladder, and if you don’t you will die an early death. Believe what I believe, or you will sink further behind. Be what I am, for to be anything else is to be profane.
This intellectual colonialism from the educated elite strip-mines America of its talent, taking what they want and leaving behind towns filling with death and despair. Lots of Americans want to stop being told they are on the wrong ladder. They want to live in a country that doesn’t insist you have to live like the elites. They want to stop being considered losers for not wanting to shape their life around building a résumé.
They want to be respected for what they believe and what they value, not studied or pitied.
