(cw: suicide, drug overdose, Trump, comparisons of things that aren’t like the AIDS crisis to the AIDS crisis.)
This is interesting, but it shies away from a lot of overt revelations.
The author had to lump together various types of death to make the comparison to the AIDS crisis work, but it kinda occludes a serious issue. There is a surprising increase in white (and Native American/Alaskan) suicide rates, but it’s not the cause of that terrifying map atop this post. A 40% increase in suicide rates makes up 6.4 deaths per 100,000 people, but at most that’d drop the red areas to a mere yellow. Suicide’s always been a rural issue, and we’ve had jumps in recessions before. By contrast, the increase in drug-related overdoses looks like this. Some of the more vulnerable populations had 30 death per 100,000 capita increases in drug and alcohol-related deaths (Case-Deaton 2016).
The other is the definition of “unnecessariat”. Scott Alexander tries to discuss this in terms of the (low) unemployment rate, but between SSDI and the nature of the term, that metric’s essential been consumed by Goodhart’s law. Labour force participation is the central focus, and it’s down significantly in these states. West Virginia notably under 50% of adults, and worse in some counties! But that’s been a long, slow decline for quite some time, and indeed if you look both the total employment count and total population hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. They’re not completely jobless – but they’re increasingly fractured between those with short-term jobs and those on the disability rolls who can’t take any above-the-table work without losing money in toto. There’s not so clear a delimination between the unnecessariat and precariat, or even the secretariat, as implied here.
This also leads to the awkward issue of mobility. Population growth for West Virginia has been incredibly low for over two decades, sometimes even dipping negative. That’s not because West Virginians have lost appetite for underprotected hetero sex, but because those who can, leave for greener pastures. You get a sort of evaporative cooling, with the remaining population too old or ill to work, with too much capital sunk into houses you couldn’t even get fire insurance on, or tied to those who do. Divorce plays a heavy role, not just because of broken relationships, but also from lawyer and court fees.
((It’s worth pointing out, here, that there’s not a single Great White Ghetto, but multiple, just as Baltimore’s problems are different from Detroit’s are different from Oakland’s. The Rust Belt’s issues have overlap with the Appalachia, and the Appalachia’s with the Plains, but they’ve significant differences that adding all the groups together obscure.
Indeed, not all of the Great White Ghetto is even white! The suicide and drug epidemic has struck Native Americans first, and some enclaves through the southern Appalacians are majority-black. Not all of these matters with generalize.))
It’s also worth pointing out the sense of decay that’s universal throughout these areas, like something out of a post-apocalyptic film. That’s most obvious in Detroit, of course, where one driving up i-75 gets a scenic view of a crumbling concrete parking garage, of the sort most Coastals would normally only see when visiting other countries after cautions not to drink the water. But between the amateur eschatology on signboards and Grandpa’s Cheese Barn there’s countless barns falling apart, and an even greater number of houses with ill-patched roofs or long-past-expiration siding. Where things are brand new, it’s often because no one owns them – tractors either date back to the seventies or are controlled by a far-off computer, motels are either rusted and closed or ‘safe’ franchises. Skyscrapers in the midwest won’t even publish their capacity (never high to start with), and remain maintained as much by embarrassment as by popular support.
There’s folk who try to undo this – anyone who’s done their taxes through TurboTax has, unknowingly, contributed to an attempt to revive downtown Detroit – but it just ends up being fancy storefront with no actually homes or businesses inside. Literally: there is a class of construction made to look used without occupants.
((This decay combined with deep-but-few-roots end up with bad economic structural differences: you see alcohol, pepsi, firearms, and trucks used as mediums of exchange and stores of value pretty heavily, and then exchanged for labour or cash during hard times. The lure of the tipped employee comes, at least in part, from having their pay today rather than in a week and a half. But increasing commodity value and decreasing land value and manpower value and even utility of extra manpower makes for a weird barter-environment version of deflation.))
The political aspect is… more complex. There’s a whole lot more to the unnecessariat’s dislike of Sanders than just that he can’t win the primary – a good many of them see promises of free or low-cost as just more ineffective job training, hear ‘clean energy’ as another nail in the coal industry coffin and another business in California, and think of infrastructure investment as another highway overpass on the other side of the state. No one’s going to turn road trips into an American past-time again – the closest we’ve seen are folk that want to replace aircraft with trains – and certainly not enough to make the motel industry viable again.
That article also misses the sense of randomness, of assault under the pressure of unpredictable and maybe unpredictable outsiders. The speeding ticket is definitely part of it – you’ve not seen midwest decay til you see someone break down over a fifty dollar speeding ticket – but it’s really just the shadow. West Virginia’s coal mines didn’t lose production because they tapped out, but because of an intentional domestic coal phaseout and increasing political protest preventing even international shipment. For the midwest plains, the Bundy group started because a single wildlife determination put his business under, and even if most people don’t take it as far as he did, most know or know of someone who’s had to fight outsiders over similar stupid problems. ((And linking to the SLPC as a summary of LaVoy Fininicum is… tasteless, especially given the current investigation in FBI misbehavior.)) It doesn’t help that ‘outsider’ can be someone who married and moved into the county a decade ago, but if you want to understand the distrust, you have to examine that.
