Deaths of Despair as Related to the Value of a College Education (gallon, healthcare)

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by phetaroi

Every day I see this thread it drives me crazy to see the title...the saying is not "deaths of despair", it's "depths of despair". Grrrrrrrrrr.

Yes, the old saying fits the types of deaths these authors discuss, but they titled their book "Deaths of Despair." Truth is these deceased are mostly in the depths of despair when they die these deaths by overdosing, alcohol or suicide. For sure, the depths of despair now causes about 100K deaths of despair. I think they intended a play on words; a more appropo title might have been Deaths FROM Despair, but it wouldn't have been all such a catchy title.

[Mike from back east]

Today's WaPo carries the ominous news that enough fentanyl was seized this year to kill every person in the USA. That's a stunning amount of drugs; I only wonder how much got in and distributed and how many more deaths we're going to see.

Excerpt: "The Drug Enforcement Administration said Tuesday it has seized more than 379 million potentially fatal doses of illegal fentanyl this year, as Mexican drug-trafficking organizations continue to flood the United States with the cheap synthetic opioid responsible for record numbers of U.S. overdose deaths. The agency said it has confiscated more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50.6 million illegal fentanyl tablets so far in 2022. That was twice the number of tablets seized in 2021, when more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Two-thirds of those deaths were caused by fentanyl, according to U.S. public health data. ... fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49. ... statistics do not include seizures tallied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection along the southern border, where authorities detected more than 14,000 pounds of illegal fentanyl — a record amount ... authorities estimate they are only catching 5-10% of the illegal fentanyl that crosses the southern border, “Fake pills are readily found on social media. No pharmaceutical pill bought on social media is safe,” the DEA said. ..."

[Mike from back east]

Chapter 14 was about how capitalism is failing our working class citizens and Chapter 15 continues that theme.

It gives an example of hospitals in Michigan where the execs got together and exchanged info on how much they paid their nurses and agreed to stop hiring nurses away from each other, i.e., they stopped poaching each other's nursing staff by offering higher pay, thus holding down pay for nurses. A class action lawsuit against those hospitals was successful. This form of collusion is usually considered illegal.

The chapter goes on to explain how merger after merger increased the market power / dominance of huge firms which allows them to hold wages down due to lack of competing firms that workers could go to in order to find higher pay.

We once had hundreds of railroads, scores of airlines, thousands of trucking firms, thousands of small grocery chains, and thousands of every variety of retail you could think of: pizza/sub shops; book sellers; car dealers; clothing shops; furniture stores; hobby shops; auto parts retailers; office supply stores; shoe shops; wine merchants; music stores; butcher shops; eateries; the list goes on. Most retail lines were rolled up into huge "category killer" firms funded by Wall Street. Lately, merger news centers on two huge grocery chains, Kroger and Alberton's/Safeway merging into one ever-more-huge chain.

Now that the trend is pretty much complete the Federal government thinks it might be time to consider the anti-trust aspects of this. Laugh or cry as you see fit, or mourn that our anti-trust history is all but dead.

The nation is becoming a fiefdom of de facto monopolies. Some are duopolies (only a duo of two eastern railroads and only a duo of two western railroads) or oligopolies where a handful of firms are dominant. Workers will find themselves stuck at whatever these market dominating firm want to pay - or under pay as the case may be. Their pervasive market power not only impacts the workers, but also their customers who are losing the benefits of marketplace competition.

Firms used to consider a variety of stakeholders (share holders, employees, customers, even their local cities and regions). But with the arrival of Jack Welch at GE in the 1980s that went out the window with his sole emphasis to please the share holders (primarily Wall Street); everyone else be damned. He earned the name "Neutron Jack" because he fired so many people that it left GE factories half empty, like the effects of the neutron bomb. In the 1930s, when floods were common along the Ohio River valley, my father's railroad (B&O) would take it upon themselves at their own expense to operate 'relief trains' of food, supplies and evacuations to the affected citizens. It was part of the B&O's stated 'good neighbor' policy towards the communities they served. Most people today have no idea what's been lost in the way of good service, local ownership, and so much more. The good old days are gone with the wind.

Congress is no help to workers. There are many thousands of industry lobbyists in DC who spent who in 2018 spent $3.5B lobbying, which equals $6.5M available to each of the 535 members of Congress. If you're a worker in the USA you're screwed and it's partly why the least educated workers among us are dying at much higher rates - deaths of despair.


EDIT TO ADD: Chapter 16, the final chapter, is about what do we do about it. Most of what the authors put forth requires political action so I won't discuss that. I will say there's no shortage of good ideas but a huge shortage of courage and willpower in Congress to address much of anything. The gap between political parties on what laws to write or rewrite and how to pay for anything will keep our sad status quo in place, and people will keep dying deaths of despair.

[CorporateCowboy]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

Deaths of Despair as Related to the Value of a College Education

Originally Posted by jtab4994

But what do you do with people who are really only suited to flipping burgers or working in a factory? What good would college, or should I say "an attempt at college", do them?

It doesn’t; if anything, it’s likely to discourage them and cause resentment/anger. Hence the point of offering opportunity to build-on or establish one’s job-preparation skills in and of itself. They can improve quality-of-life or benefit from furthering their education (within the scope of their own abilities) by way of community college, vocational schools, certificate programs and such - even a GED (a likely prerequisite for some training programs).

[MKTwet]

You can learn more from youtube and the web than from colleges. If you spend the same amount of time in college as you do learning on the internet. You will make money faster and retain more wealth than someone with a 4 year degree.

College grads I've met carries atleast a $100k debt starts with careers making only $50k. How does a college grad get ahead having to live and pay loans that don't result in pay that scale with their college tuition.

The higher the education the higher the debt to income ratio. Anybody who has a masters or PHD is making about as much as someone in a tech job with just 2 years of basic java coding experience. You can learn java development at home in about 3-4 months online.

[jbgusa]

Originally Posted by MKTwet

You can learn more from youtube and the web than from colleges. If you spend the same amount of time in college as you do learning on the internet. You will make money faster and retain more wealth than someone with a 4 year degree.

YouTube is lousy at socialization and forming lifelong ties. One of the functions of college is to form ties that will last in business and social life.

For example, a bit more than ten years after graduation I was introduced to my wife by a college friend. That never would have happened if I was a Youtube user name. She, in turn, was impressed by my college "resume" as her uncle, grandfather, great-aunt and other family members I can't think of were Cornell graduates. When I met my current senior work college on the train, that part of my resume impressed him. I doubt that would have happened if I listed YouTube channels to which I subscribe. Well, there aren't any.

As for cost, I've posted elsewhere on that and agree that the costs are excessive.

[ILTXwhatnext]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

YouTube is lousy at socialization and forming lifelong ties. One of the functions of college is to form ties that will last in business and social life.

For example, a bit more than ten years after graduation I was introduced to my wife by a college friend. That never would have happened if I was a Youtube user name. She, in turn, was impressed by my college "resume" as her uncle, grandfather, great-aunt and other family members I can't think of were Cornell graduates. When I met my current senior work college on the train, that part of my resume impressed him. I doubt that would have happened if I listed YouTube channels to which I subscribe. Well, there aren't any.

As for cost, I've posted elsewhere on that and agree that the costs are excessive.

When I had my last evaluation, the asst principal said she had never had to handle so many fights as last year. Students trying to study on computers remotely had forgotten how to use words...when we came back to school, they quickly resorted to fists. They lost all sorts of "soft skills" when they weren't in school.

In 1971, my ex-brother-in-law went to community college. The tuition was $2 per credit hour. In 1981, same school, the tuition was $10 per credit hour. Today, same school, it's over $70 per credit hour. Inflation calculator says if you start with the $2 figure in 1971, then it predicts $4.49 for 1981 and $14.70 for 2022. If you start with $10 in 1981, it predicts $32.75 for 2022. I don't know how people afford it...

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[Vision67]

Another factor leading to Deaths of Despair is the dating game.

Most young people these days use on-line apps to find potential dates and mates. The system filters out most men. The young women, who are very selective shoot for the top 10% of men who fit a 60/60/60 profile, i.e. makes 6 figures, is over 6 feet tall, and has 6 pack abs. That excludes most men.

If you are a young man with an average face, a pot belly, and a low paying manual labor job, you don't make the cut. Testosterone has poisoned your mind. You think about sex all the time but you are getting none.

[MKTwet]

Originally Posted by Vision67

Another factor leading to Deaths of Despair is the dating game.

Most young people these days use on-line apps to find potential dates and mates. The system filters out most men. The young women, who are very selective shoot for the top 10% of men who fit a 60/60/60 profile, i.e. makes 6 figures, is over 6 feet tall, and has 6 pack abs. That excludes most men.

If you are a young man with an average face, a pot belly, and a low paying manual labor job, you don't make the cut. Testosterone has poisoned your mind. You think about sex all the time but you are getting none.

Haha, I love this info that you probably gotten from Andrew Tate. But that only applies to women who are above average looking which is say only 20-25% of the women dating pool are of the above avg look and within the desirable age range. This hasn't changed throughout history, online dating amped it up that's all.

The answer to this is simply quite the dating app game. I don't know why guys even bother wasting money on what is a rigged game. If you want to win in the online dating game, you have to spend a lot of money to dress up your pictures and pay for a ton of boosts to get more hits above others.

For women, if you want to find Mr. Right. You need to spend more time filtering and reading profiles rather than take the top hits that were procured to you by guys who paid for boosters.

[Mike from back east]

Got some new info to share, from a NY Times article titled: American Teens Are Really Miserable. Why?

The author writes, and I excerpt these points:
- "American teenagers, and especially American teenage girls, are increasingly miserable: more likely to entertain suicidal thoughts and act on them, more likely to experience depression, more likely to feel beset by “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,”..."

- "N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt, a leading alarm-sounder, in indicator after indicator you can see an inflection point somewhere in the early 2010s, where a darkening begins that continues to this day. Haidt thinks the key instigator is the rise of social media. . . ."

- "Overall I think if you’re looking for a single explanatory shock, Haidt’s camp has the better of the argument. The timing of the mental health trend fits the smartphone’s increasing substitution for in-person socialization, . . . "

IMO, Jonathan Haidt's observations coincide with the iPhone, social media and the Great Recession.

IMO it isn't just one thing, it's a perfect storm of many causes: peer pressure, isolation, bullies, single parents unable to hold it all together, one or both parents whacked out alcohol/drugs, easy availability of numerous harmful substances, school staffs too few in number or too poorly resourced to help kids or maintain good order on school grounds, addictive cell phone use, too much time on social media and/or pandering for "likes," not enough time focusing on their own personality development, trying to emulate "influencers" like the KarTrashians, poor ideas about who or what they want to be 10-20-30 years down the road, and a general disregard for the value of a good education.

Page 59-60 of this CDC study uses charts to key in on the trends.

Tying this back into the topic of this thread, these kids haven't even been to college, thus they don't have the benefits of that eye-opening experience that would enable them to cope. Lacking the abilities to cope and find solutions to their issues, it's no wonder so many students have "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" that often lead to suicidal thoughts and attempts.