The Opioid Epidemic and The Student Loan Crisis: Is there a link?

James Howard Kunstler wrote one of his best essays recently about America's opioid epidemic, and he began with this observation:

 While the news waves groan with stories about "America's Opioid Epidemic," you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what's behind it, namely the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.

Kunstler went on to describe life in small towns and rural America: the empty store fronts, abandoned houses, neglected fields, and "the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town."

Kunstler also commented on people's physical appearance in backwater America: "prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sick in despair." And he described how many people living in the forgotten America spend their time: "trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort."

There are no jobs in flyover America. No wonder opioid addiction has become epidemic in the old American heartland. No wonder death rates are going up for working-class white Americans--spiked by suicide, alcohol and drug addiction.

I myself come from the desperate heartland Kunstler described. Anadarko, Oklahoma, county seat of Caddo County, made the news awhile back due to four youth suicides in quick succession--all accomplished with guns. Caddo County, shaped liked the state of Utah, can easily be spotted on the New York Times map showing where drug deaths are highest in the United States. Appalachia, eastern Oklahoma, the upper Rio Grande Valley, and yes--Caddo County have the nation's highest death rates caused by drugs.

Why? Kunstler puts his finger on it: "These are the people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them. They do not work at things that matter.They have no prospect for a better life . . . ."

Now here is the point I wish to make. These Americans, who now live in despair, once hoped for a better life. There was a spark of buoyancy and optimism in these people when they were young. They believed then--and were incessantly encouraged to believe--that education would improve their economic situation. If they just obtained a degree from an overpriced, dodgy for-profit college or a technical certificate from a mediocre trade school, or maybe a bachelor's degree from the obscure liberal arts college down the road--they would spring into the middle class.

Postsecondary education, these pathetic fools believed, would deliver them into ranch-style homes, perhaps with a swimming pool in the backyard; into better automobiles, into intact and healthy families that would put their children into good schools.

And so these suckers took out student loans to pay for bogus educational experiences, often not knowing the interest rate on the money they borrowed or the payment terms. Without realizing it, they signed covenants not to sue--covenants written in type so small and expressed in language so obscure they did not realize they were signing away their right to sue for fraud even as they were being defrauded.

And a great many people who embarked on these quixotic educational adventures did not finish the educational programs they started, or they finished them and found the degrees or certificates they acquired did not lead to good jobs. So they stopped paying on their loans and were put into default.

And then the loan collectors arrived--reptilian agencies like Educational Credit Management Corporation or Navient Solutions.  The debt collectors add interest and penalties to the amount the poor saps borrowed, and all of a sudden, they owe twice what they borrowed, or maybe three times what they borrowed. Or maybe even four times what they borrowed.

Does this scenario--repeated millions of time across America over the last 25 years--drive people to despair? Does it drive them to drug addiction, to alcoholism, to suicide?

Of course not.

And even if it does, who the hell cares?

Drug Deaths in 2014

References

James Howard Kunstler. The National Blues. Clusterfuck Nation, April 28, 2017.

Sarah Kaplan.'It has brought us to our knees': Small Okla. town reeling from suicide epidemic. Washington Post, January 25, 2016.

Natalie Kitroeff. Loan Monitor is Accused of Ruthless Tactics on Student Debt. New York Times, January 1, 2014. 

Gina Kolata and Sarah Cohen. Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites. New York Times, January 16, 2016.

Robert Shireman and Tariq Habash. Have Student Loan Guaranty Agencies Lost Their Way? The Century Foundation, September 29, 2016. 

Haeyoun Park and Matthew Bloch. How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America. New York Times, January 19, 2017.

America's "Men Without Work": It's not their fault

Almost a third of American men in their prime working years are not working. Thirty-two percent of men older than 20 are out of the labor force--double the rate in 1948. And a lot of unemployed men aren't even looking for work. According to Nicholas Eberstadt,  author of Men Without Work, only 15 percent of American men in the 25-54 age group who didn't work in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find a job.

Of course some of these men are disabled, but the percentage of men sitting on the sidelines because of some certified disability seems too high. Eberstadt reports that there were 134 workers for every officially disabled person in 1960 (as summarized by George Will). Today, there is one disabled person for every 16 workers--in spite of the fact that the American workplace has become much safer over the last 50 years.

Eberstadt argues that unemployment has become a "viable option" for millions of American men, and George Will implicitly scolded this vast population--saying these unemployed men have chosen a life of "protracted idleness."

But I know some of these men, and I think most would prefer to be working. Here are some examples of men I know personally.

• A friend who worked in the petrochemical industry was laid off in his 50s when the company he worked for merged with another company. He found various part-time jobs at minimal pay and then took his Social Security benefits early--at age 62. He and his wife are living frugally on Social Security income and modest savings.

• A guy I know worked as an architectural draftsman but he didn't upgrade his skills when  computer-assisted drawings (CAD) fundamentally changed the nature of his craft by greatly speeding up the drafting process and making it less expensive. He is not lazy. I've seen his enormous garden, from which he derives a substantial amount of his food.

• Another friend worked many years in public education and gained a reputation for being an effective disciplinarian in chaotic urban schools. But the work burned him out, and he took his state pension early. He does carpentry work and cabinet work from time to time, but essentially lives off his pension.

I  come in contact with unemployed men all the time, and few of them are happy. No wonder the suicide rate for middle-aged white Americans has gone up substantially in recent years, along with death from alcohol- and drug-related causes.

In my opinion, this doleful trend cannot be explained by laziness. There are lots of reasons.

First, the nation's economy has failed working-class and middle-class Americans--which is what Donald Trump has been saying with considerable effect. Millions of Americans have been shoved out of the workforce as low-skill and medium-skill jobs have gone overseas.  And of course, our multinational corporations don't give a damn about the millions of Americans who have been thrown out of work. Profits are greater if goods are manufactured by exploited Asians rather than middle-class Americans.

Second, Americans have been betrayed by our educational system. The United States has a crummy educational system. Too many people graduate from high school without the  minimum reading and math skills they need to find a job or to profit from postsecondary education. 

And postsecondary education is a disaster. Our government is shoveling money into predatory for-profit colleges that have ripped off our most vulnerable young people--minorities and first-generation college students. Our elite liberal arts colleges obsess on race and sexual identity and care more about creating "safe spaces" than they do about producing problem solvers. Our public institutions have become vast bureaucratic mazes run by spineless and clueless administrative robots.

No wonder so many working-age men are unemployed. They didn't get the skills they needed to be productive workers in our post-industrial economy. Many of them tried to get those skills and wound up with no skills and a lot of student-loan debt.

Third, American cultural institutions no longer respect and support the American family. There was a time when our government, our churches, and our civic institutions honored the American family; and it was universally understood that the foundations of our culture rested on extended families that nurtured children and provided essential support for their members in times of trouble. I thank God I am part of such a family. 

But all that is falling away. And this distressing trend, in my view, contributes to a vast subculture of working-age men who do not work. At one time family obligations and a personal sense of honor prompted men to work to support their families--even if that meant working for poverty wages under humiliating conditions.

But many men no longer recognize family obligations. They do not work and save so their children can go to college. Rather their children are expected to take out loans to pay for their college education. They do not recognize a moral responsibility to be the breadwinner for their wives and children; women are expected to work. In fact, our society celebrates the fact that it now takes two working adults instead of one to support a family--as if every working woman is a lawyer or a brain surgeon instead of working as clerk in convenience store, which is the reality for millions of working American women.

It's not their fault

In short, the high percentage of unemployed men cannot be explained by indolence. Our culture, our government, our colleges and schools, and our post-industrial economy have conspired to create a world in which millions of American men see no point in working. And to suggest--as some commentators have done--that this calamitous trend is attributable to laziness completely misses the mark.

References

Nicholas Eberstadt. Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2016).

George Will, America's 'quiet catastrophe': Millions of idle men. Washington Post, October 5, 2016. Accessible at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.d45b9f19bab9

Anne  Case and Angus Deaton. Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.  Accessible at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf

Editorial. Death Among Middle Aged Whites. New York Times, November 5, 2015.

Katherine A. Hempstead and Julie A. Phillips. Rising Suicide Among Adults Aged
40–64 Years: The Role of Job and Financial Circumstances.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine 84(5):491-500 (2015). Accessible at: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(14)00662-X/pdf

Jason Iuliano. An Empirical Assessment of Student Loan Discharge and the Undue Hardship
Gina Kolata. Deaths Rates Rising Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds. NewYork Times, November 3, 2015. Accessibe at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

Betsy McKay. The Death Rate Is Rising for Midle-Aged Whites. Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-rate-is-rising-for-middle-aged-whites-1446499495