10.17.16
Wait, not addicted to porn — instead, addicted to painkillers and on disability
Not even close to getting it right, the New York Times tackles the grave social ill of the vast pool of out-of-work American men, seven million of ’em:
Economists have long struggled to explain why a growing proportion of men in the prime of their lives are not employed or looking for work. A new study has found that nearly half of these men are on painkillers and many are disabled …
Surveys taken between 2010 and this year show that 40 percent of prime working-age men who are not in the labor force report having pain that prevents them from taking jobs for which they are qualified. More than a third of the men not in the labor force said they had difficulty walking or climbing stairs or had another disability. Forty-four percent said they took painkillers daily and two-thirds of that subset were on prescription medicines …
The connection between chronic joblessness and painkiller dependency is hard to quantify. Mr. Krueger and other experts cannot say which came first: the men’s health problems or their absence from the labor force. Some experts suspect that frequent use of painkillers is a result of being out of work, because people who have no job prospects are more likely to be depressed, become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have other mental health problems.
I can assert I’ve never had a vicodin, an oxycontin or a hypo of heroin. And I am not on disability. I have not been diagnosed with depression. As to “other mental health problems,” who can say?
More research is needed, admits the newspaper. In the meantime, maybe “some things could be done to help workers who’ve given up.”
Thoughtful.
From the archives, on “the grave social ill.”
If you read the fine print, economist Dean Baker attributes the unemployment to lack of demand in a slack or stagnant economy, citing statistics that across the board, all demographics have seen rises in mass unemployment, although to differing degrees depending on positioning.
“While [the Times piece references] interesting work, implying that the problem of people dropping out of the labor force is a story about men is seriously misleading,” writes Baker today.” Both prime-age men and women have been increasingly dropping out of the labor force in the last 15 years.”
“The more obvious source of the problem lies with the people (disproportionately men) designing economic policy.”
Ouch. Could our great leaders be secretly nursing opioid addictions?