Self Preservation and Irreversible Decline [was: Electronic Freedom Foundation selective in support of freedom]

[coderman]

related:

'''
In Stayin’ Alive, his powerful history of the “last days” of the
working class, the historian Jefferson Cowie describes how the proud
blue-collar identity of previous generations disintegrated during the
’70s. “Liberty has largely been reduced to an ideology that promises
economic and cultural refuge from the long arm of the state,” he
writes, “while seemingly lost to history is the logic that culminated
under the New Deal: that genuine freedom could only happen within a
context of economic security.” As working-class solidarity receded, an
identity built on racial tribalism often swept in.
'''
 - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/

The Atlantic
All Hollowed Out

The lonely poverty of America’s white working class
Eric Thayer / Reuters     Victor Tan Chen Jan 16, 2016 Business

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the
striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus
Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans
across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and
fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large
that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern
trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have
challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths
(particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to
agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction
have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not
in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared
the worst.

Meanwhile, other recent research has piled on the bad news for those
without college degrees. A Pew study released last month found that
the size of the middle class—defined by a consistent income range
across generations—has shrunk over the last several decades. In part,
this is because high-paying jobs for the less educated are vanishing.
The study builds on other recent research that finds that almost all
the good jobs created since the recession have gone to college
graduates.

The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on
unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues
about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the
Case and Deaton study. This is one of the groups hit hardest by the
rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial
insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their
experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have
become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh
offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

One man I talked to was 47 years old, the son of a Detroit factory
worker who headed into the plants himself. (As is standard in
sociology, my interviewees were promised confidentiality.) He told me
how he recently lost his $11-an-hour job: He was driving a forklift at
his company’s plant when he accidentally crashed into a ladder. No one
was hurt and nothing was damaged—but he was an at-will worker at a
company with no union, and he was fired. Shortly afterward, his wife,
who was making $8 an hour at a cleaning company, decided to leave him.
The stress of failing to find a job and being alone made him too
depressed to eat, and he started taking antidepressants.

When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important
to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played
in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class. For
generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to
college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then
others—to be upwardly mobile. Bringing together large numbers of
people under a single roof, factory jobs were also relatively easy to
organize. As the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld have
argued, unions at their prime helped create a “moral economy” in which
wages rose both in firms with unions and those without them, and in
which the average worker had a notable voice—however compromised back
then by nativism and other exclusionary tendencies—lobbying on their
behalf in Washington.

But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and
Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped
dramatically. Intensified by free-trade deals such as NAFTA, the
hollowing-out of American industry then was much greater, in terms of
the absolute number of jobs lost, than what the country experienced
during its first wave of deindustrialization.

Twenty years ago, union membership—in decline since the ’60s—fell to a
level not seen since the Great Depression. For various reasons, it
became much harder to pursue the sorts of collective action that
unions once cultivated throughout the economy—that is, banding
together to convince companies and governments to treat employees
better. Free trade and automation undercut the bargaining positions of
the working class. Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy,
rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar
period. Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a
cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly
tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.

As organized labor in this country has withered, an extreme
individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone
perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming
successful on one’s own merit. This works well for some, but for
others—especially the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who
don’t have a bachelor’s degree—it often means getting mired in an
economy of contract work, low pay, and few, if any, benefits. These
prospects suggest that this is an age of diminished expectations for
the working class.

Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos
continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their
overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has
narrowed. Indeed, the broader story that many commentators seem to
have neglected in recent months is the decline of the working class as
a whole. In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were
denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the
white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth. If the gains of
economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that
earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in
living standards from generation to generation, and they grew
accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity. When the
labor market turned against them, they had the hardest fall.
Many in the working class are going without marriage—a form of social support.

Any explanation of the ominous trends in the Case and Deaton study is,
at the moment, speculative. More research is needed, as social
scientists like to say, and there are numerous caveats. For example,
while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little
education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle
class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified
in the Case and Deaton study. After all, other countries have not seen
similar hikes in deaths, even though manufacturing and (to a lesser
extent) union membership have crumbled abroad as well.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these
market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not
suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse
that whites have. It may be that changes in the economy have affected
these workers in different ways. For instance, whites are more likely
to be employed in the declining manufacturing sector than African
Americans or Hispanics—and for that matter, they’re more likely to
live in the rural communities devastated by this most recent,
post-NAFTA era of deindustrialization. Furthermore, whites are less
likely to be union members than African Americans (though not Asians
or Hispanics).

Yet there is clearly more to the despair of the working class than
empty wallets and purses. Patches of the social fabric that once
supported them, in good times and bad, have frayed. When asked in
national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important
matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school
education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has
risen over the years for college graduates, too). This trend is
troubling, given that social isolation is linked to depression and, in
turn, suicide and substance abuse.
Related Story

Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair

One form of social support that many in the working class are going
without is marriage. I’m reminded of another worker I interviewed, a
jobless 54-year-old white woman who used to work at a Ford plant. Her
husband left her, she says, when the paychecks stopped coming. “Jesus
Christ,” she told him once. “I didn’t think that our relationship was
based on the amount of money that I brought in.” Unable to pay her
mortgage, she lost her home and had to move in, as she puts it, with a
“man friend.” She is depressed, unable to sleep at night, and
constantly worried about falling into poverty. “I’m a loser,” she
says.

As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin
and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less
educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner
up and have kids. Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely
to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those
with less schooling. The white working class in particular is seeing
sharp drops in these indicators—again, not to the levels of nonwhites,
but a drastic reversal all the same, and one that has intensified over
the last few decades.

A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s
attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed.
But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to
these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among
the long-term unemployed made plain to me. Those struggling
financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first
comes marriage, then comes a baby. And if they do choose to get
married, there is little room for unemployment. As the Detroit man who
lost his job told me, he and his wife split up “because she’s working,
and … I don’t have any money coming in.” They had been fighting over
finances even before he lost his job, he points out, but the arguments
grew more heated afterward. In a lone-wolf economy, as sociologists
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have argued, why take a chance on a
partner down on his luck when you’re just barely surviving yourself?

The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the
modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number
of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost
tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent
in 2014. Whites fall disproportionately into this camp. The
religiously unaffiliated are not necessarily secular in their outlook.
Many of them are spiritually inclined but skeptical of organized
religion—especially its intrusion into politics. However, in the
absence of any other source of social support and collective meaning
(say, unions), there’s less in the way of psychological protection
from the slings and arrows of American society.

This sort of isolation was common among the people I talked to. Many
said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles,
yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be
around people because they were out of work. For others, their
religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a
source of community. For example, one of the workers I interviewed
said that being out of work for so long had filled him with a constant
rage. To calm his mind, every night he would pick up his Bible and
read a dozen verses. He had given up on the church and what he
described as its superficial ways. “I want to go to hear the Word—I
don’t want to go to see what you’re wearing,” says the man, 53 and
from Flint, Michigan. The other way he copes is going outside for a
smoke.

For this man and many like him, there is no one to talk to, no one to
rely on. “Nowadays, you got people you really can’t trust, man,” he
says. “You can’t call everybody your friend.” As the ties that bind
them to others have unraveled, the working class has become an ever
lonelier crowd.
Policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term
unemployment could make a huge difference.

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s
culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an
extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail
have only themselves to blame. They should have gotten more education.
They should have been more prepared. On this score, too, the U.S.
deviates from other wealthy nations. America’s frontier spirit of
rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by
race and education level, too. White Americans, for instance, are more
likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African
Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly
less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate
degree.

In Stayin’ Alive, his powerful history of the “last days” of the
working class, the historian Jefferson Cowie describes how the proud
blue-collar identity of previous generations disintegrated during the
’70s. “Liberty has largely been reduced to an ideology that promises
economic and cultural refuge from the long arm of the state,” he
writes, “while seemingly lost to history is the logic that culminated
under the New Deal: that genuine freedom could only happen within a
context of economic security.” As working-class solidarity receded, an
identity built on racial tribalism often swept in.

With that in mind, it’s interesting that Americans tout the importance
of getting an education—an inherently individualistic strategy—as the
pathway to success. This view was the ideological backbone of the
Clinton administration policies put forth in the ’90s, with their
individual training accounts and lifetime-learning credits. To this
day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that
Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can
agree on. But this sort of zeal can lead to the view that those who
have less education—the working class—are truly to blame for their
dire straits. While many of them will go on to obtain more education,
many others will not—because they can’t afford it, aren’t good
students, or just (as some of my workers said) prefer working with
their hands. But if they don’t collect the educational degrees needed
for today’s good jobs, they are made to feel that they have failed in
a fundamental way.

Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused
rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely,
the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in
heroin use, notably among whites. There is clearly a pressing need to
deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal
overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working
class in particular.

At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors
are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link
and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to
consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of
risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support. Seeing
this big picture is important because blocking one pathway to disease
or death—say, opioid abuse—may just lead to people to opt for another
deadly means of coping with the pain of their poor life prospects.

One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from
sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge
difference. In advanced industrial nations that have stronger social
safety nets, the working class is not experiencing the rising death
rates that Case and Deaton identified. Abroad, many of the
working-class unemployed benefit from a financial backstop of sorts
that keeps them from hurtling into the deepest forms of desperation.
Here in the U.S. they would too, if only there were such a thing.

* This article originally named one of the co-authors of this paper as
Susan Case. We regret the error.