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The title implys the opposite of the last lines of the article... > “I do think it is related to declining labor-force participation among prime-age workers,”F

• rainbowmverse 9y ago
  A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. It may be constitutionally incapable of considering that rising poverty and its ills are a result of mindless outsourcing and automation leading to structural unemployment.
  • dingbat 9y ago
    i wouldnt put that much meaning into reasons for the misleading headline choice. simplest explanation is "Opioid Use Explains..." is better clickbait than "Not Sure if Opioid Use is Causal or Symptom"
    • dv_dt 9y ago
      "Opioid use associated with.." would be better journalism. "Explains" is clickbait indeed.
      • nsxwolf 9y ago
        That's better journalism but to the average reader "associated with" means "causes".
  • pishpash 9y ago
    Another example of externality not priced into costs -- if businesses had to bear retraining/unemployment costs to society, they may not outsource as much, or they may still outsource, but be better community citizens. It might also spur governments to do more to stay competitive in a sustainable way, e.g. investing more in education.
    • replicatorblog 9y ago
      "The United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob...
      • fao_ 9y ago
        That doesn't mean that that money is managed well, though.
        • replicatorblog 9y ago
          I totally agree, but any discussion of approaches that might improve the efficacy of the spend, e.g. more competition via charters/vouchers, or creating a merit pay system for teachers, is not permitted in polite society. The only solution in elite policy circles is to spend more. The reality is we spend plenty, but we have a structure that makes it difficult to experiment. The problem is exacerbated because the most influential members of the upper classes can bypass the problem by either paying for private schools or by taking advantage of our neo-feudal school districting system and buy into exclusive neighborhoods with "public schools" — which are open to anyone who can swing a $1M mortgage!
        • themaninthedark 9y ago
          Nor does it specifically help men. Currently the education system is geared to helping women and some of the policies actually punish men. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/ Add in the fact that blue collar jobs are declining, most men are going to ask what is the point of trying. The answer they get back from society is one that they are unneeded.
      • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
        The US also spends more per person on healthcare, yet has worse outcomes[1]. Cost is not always a good indicator of quality. [1] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20170715-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...
  • beepboopbeep 9y ago
    bloomberg has some of the best reporting out there. I would not discount it just because it's business driven.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • rainbowmverse 9y ago
      I didn't discount its general reporting. I suggested its inherent bias on the subject might make it a poor source in this one case.
  • Pica_soO 9y ago
    They want there customers to feel good. Shirking responsibilities for ones fellow human and redistributing blame feels good. Its a similar service as prostitution but for the consciousness. Im interested on what there stance towards the DAO is going to be. A Contract-golem replacing CEOs - that's there audience being replaced. Wonder if they are going to stay Neo-Liberal while the Revolution they spawned eats them.
  • darawk 9y ago
    Its most likely though that the causality flows in all directions at once. Structural unemployment causes drug use, drug use causes unemployment. Unemployment causes more unemployment (if your friends are unemployed, it doesn't seem quite so bad, maybe you don't try as hard to get a job). Drug use causes more drug use (if your friend loves Oxycontin, maybe you'd like it too).
    • godzillabrennus 9y ago
      Not to mention that drug use tends to push you into con college (prison) and you can't find a good job after that.
      • macintux 9y ago
        The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.
        • munificent 9y ago
          And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".
          • darawk 9y ago
            That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?
            • geofft 9y ago
              The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience. It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
            • 9y ago
  • jondubois 9y ago
    Yes very good point. When I think about how ridiculously hard I've had to work just to maintain the lifestyle that my parents had and I compare that to how little my parents had to work (and how little ambition they had), it's very clear to me that the baseline amount of work and ambition required to get a decent modest lifestyle has become insanely high. Giving up actually makes sense. Drugs give back that feeling of satisfaction that has gone missing from people's lives.
    • slg 9y ago
      I think that is dangerous mindset. It is unnecessarily idealizing the past while glossing over any potential flaws. It insinuates that people were happier in the past and it ignores that the standard of living for most Americans has gone up over the decades (due mostly to technology and globalization even with little to no increased income). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things, but lamenting about the good old days is further delaying that progress. EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.
      • toyg 9y ago
        But it is true that in the past a lower-middle-class family could live on one salary, and office workers would often work less than 36 hours per week. Nowadays two salaries per family are required to stay just above the poverty line, and jobs require a minimum of 40 hours everywhere. This not just in America btw, the same happened all over Western Europe too. It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.
        • slg 9y ago
          If you dig through the data here [1] you will see that the annual average hours worked by Americans has decreased over the years. The same is true for the French, British, and Germans. Some of that more recent decline might be due to underemployment, but I think it stands in contrast to your accusation that longer hours are some type of new norm. "We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on. [1] - https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
  • dominotw 9y ago
    Would it be possible to setup 'no minimum wage' economic zones in the country. I know many ppl got their start in tech from doing tech support, perhaps that would help ppl build their skills ( and confidence) from the jobs that get in-sourced from India. Govt can prbly foot the bill to makeup for the wage loss. Just a thought. Empty mind is devils workshop.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • dv_dt 9y ago
      That would be an interesting way to experiment with UBI, in a economic zone with sufficient UBI, you allow no min wage, no unemployment, etc...
    • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Given that corporate profits are higher than ever yet only very few are benefiting from that gain, it should be fairly obvious that trickle-down economics isn't working. Why not increase taxes while limiting imports from countries with minimum wages much lower than ours? That way the lower and middle classes would actually see an increase in quality of life, not a decrease that they would see if we removed the minimum wage.
      • methodover 9y ago
        I would definitely not vote for someone in favor of that idea. I see no reason to believe that lower and middle classes here would see an increase in QOL if we started enacting trade restrictions on countries with lower standards of livings than ourselves. What you're talking about is essentially mercantilism, and it's long been discredited in economics.
  • adekok 9y ago
    Rising poverty, loss of manual labor jobs, and permanent injury from manual labor jobs. The men aren't working because they're either injured or unemployed. Then, because their life sucks, the are more likely to turn to drugs. Saying "opioids explain unemployment" has it exactly 100% backwards. The average guy with a job, a house, wife, and 2.2 kids isn't going to get hooked on opioids. His life is already full.
  • gumby 9y ago
    > A business news organization seems like it would be biased toward explaining unemployment as a symptom of drug use rather than the other way around. Why? There's plenty of money to spread around in the drug wars too.
• airza 9y ago
  for some reason you left out the quote just previous to that, “I do think it is related to declining labor-force participation among prime-age workers,” which indicates she thinks there is a relationship?
  • smallnamespace 9y ago
    Yes on the relationship, no on the direction of causality
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • dv_dt 9y ago
    Misread/paste - added the full quote. I don't think it really changes Yellen's position FWIW which is basically correlation != causation.
• jackhack 9y ago
  So to summarize: The head of a cabal of international banks busy looting western civilization through deliberate inflation admits lack of knowledge about relationship between drug use and American unemployment while speaking to her figurehead bosses in the Senate. tl;dr Janet Yellen figuratively shrugs shoulders.
  • dv_dt 9y ago
    Yellen is reflecting the content of the Kreuger paper linked in the article which also states that it has not established causality...
• wordsmattr338 9y ago
  Keyword in title: could "Opioid use COULD explain 20%..." Seems backed up by this part of your quote: "I don’t know if it’s causal or if it’s a symptom of long-running economic maladies..." The title implies exactly what was quoted.
  • sctb 9y ago
    We updated the headline to include "Could", but the original title does not.
• azernik 9y ago
  Which is good journalism - mentioning alternate explanations to the research paper that is the main subject.
• emodendroket 9y ago
  It's possible that one trend feeds the other in a vicious cycle, to be sure.