Angus deaton

 Less than a bachelor’s degree 

 Bachelor’s degree or more 

Sources: Current Population Survey, March supplement; authors’ calculations. 

40

50

60

30

Age

60

40

20

40

50

60

Age

30

1980

1970

1960

1950

1940

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ANNE CASE and ANGUS DEATON 

433

These accounts share much, though not all, with Charles Murray’s 

(2012) account of decline among whites in his fictional “Fishtown.” Murray  

argues that traditional American virtues—especially industriousness—are 

being lost among working-class white Americans. In this argument, the 

withdrawal of men from the labor force reflects this loss of industrious-

ness; young men in particular prefer leisure—which is now more valu-

able because of video games (Aguiar and others 2017)—though much of 

the withdrawal of young men is for education (Krueger 2016). The loss 

of virtue is supported and financed by government payments, particularly 

disability payments (Eberstadt 2016). If this malaise is responsible for  

the mortality and morbidity epidemic, it is unclear why we do not see 

rising mortality rates for blacks, for Hispanics, for more educated whites,  

or indeed for Europeans, although this last group has universal health care 

and, again, a much more generous safety net. Indeed, in some European  

countries, disability programs are so generous and so widely claimed that 

average retirement ages are below the minimum legal retirement age (Gruber  

and Wise 2007).

According to Alan Krueger (2016), half the men who are out of the 

labor force are taking pain medication, and two-thirds of those take a pre-

scription painkiller, such as an opioid. Doctors also bear responsibility 

for their willingness to (over)prescribe drugs (Quinones 2015; Barnett, 

Olenski, and Jena 2017), especially when they have little idea of how to 

cure addiction if and when it occurs. There are also reasonable questions 

about an approval system run by the U.S. Food and Drug Administra-

tion that licenses a class of drugs that has killed about 200,000 people. 

We should note that a central beneficiary of opioids are the pharmaceuti-

cal companies that have promoted their sales. According to Harriet Ryan, 

Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover (2016), Purdue Pharmaceutical had earned 

$31 billion from sales of OxyContin as of mid-2016.

In our account here, we emphasize the labor market, globalization, and 

technical change as the fundamental forces, and put less focus on any loss 

of virtue, though we certainly accept that the latter could be a consequence 

of the former. Virtue is easier to maintain when it is rewarded. Yet there 

is surely general agreement on the roles played by changing beliefs and 

attitudes, particularly the acceptance of cohabitation, and of the rearing of 

children in unstable cohabiting unions.

These slow-acting social forces seem to us to be plausible candi-

dates to explain rising morbidity and mortality, particularly suicide and 

the other deaths of despair, which share much with suicide. As we have 

emphasized elsewhere (Case and Deaton 2017), purely economic accounts  

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434

 

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2017

of suicide have rarely been successful in explaining the phenomenon. If 

they work at all, they work through their effects on family, on spiritual 

fulfillment, and on how people perceive meaning and satisfaction in their 

lives in a way that goes beyond material success. At the same time, increas-

ing distress, and the failure of life to turn out as expected, are consistent 

with people compensating through other risky behaviors such as abuse of 

alcohol and drug use that predispose toward the outcomes we have been 

discussing.