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> if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars There's more people dying each year due

by jahaja 6y ago

> if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars There's more people dying each year due to lack of health care access in the US alone than multiples of the Kosovo War. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin... Add to that all the drug overdoses in the US for just 2019: > Drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 4.6% in 2019 to 70,980 https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2020-07-16-cdc-drug-overdose-deaths-46-2019 https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2020-07-16-cdc-drug-overdo... That's over 100k deaths per year that's definitely strongly linked to economic despair.

bhupy 6y ago
1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't afford treatment, it would be different than if I straight up shot you in the head. The cumulative deaths caused by motor accidents also outnumbers the Kosovo casualty count (by a lot), and yet we do not consider the former to be worse than the latter. Also, drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society than war and genocide. 2. Even if indirect/preventable deaths were somehow comparable to war/revolution/genocide, this is pretty much unique to the US, whose government inefficiently allocates welfare. Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands etc etc etc all rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of their goods & services. The fact that the US has an inefficient welfare system is somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand: whether the (peaceful) creative destruction yields more efficient outcomes than structural rigidity and institutional sclerosis. If the US instituted a UBI or more efficiently allocated its public health spending to include those that may be unable to afford healthcare, it doesn't change the fact that in the majority of liberal democracies that rely predominately on the private sector, structural change doesn't need to be brought about through violence, even if the governments and their institutions remain rigid.
- jahaja 6y ago
  1. Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. 2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    > Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways. You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform. > It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology. "Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent. In every single comparably wealthy country, the public sector makes up a (stark) minority of the workforce -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se... The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc. In the countries devoid of the kind of opioid deaths you speak of, economic freedom is among the highest, many even higher than the US -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.

by jahaja 6y ago

bhupy 6y ago

1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't afford treatment, it would be different than if I straight up shot you in the head. The cumulative deaths caused by motor accidents also outnumbers the Kosovo casualty count (by a lot), and yet we do not consider the former to be worse than the latter. Also, drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society than war and genocide. 2. Even if indirect/preventable deaths were somehow comparable to war/revolution/genocide, this is pretty much unique to the US, whose government inefficiently allocates welfare. Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands etc etc etc all rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of their goods & services. The fact that the US has an inefficient welfare system is somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand: whether the (peaceful) creative destruction yields more efficient outcomes than structural rigidity and institutional sclerosis. If the US instituted a UBI or more efficiently allocated its public health spending to include those that may be unable to afford healthcare, it doesn't change the fact that in the majority of liberal democracies that rely predominately on the private sector, structural change doesn't need to be brought about through violence, even if the governments and their institutions remain rigid.

jahaja 6y ago
1. Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. 2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
- bhupy 6y ago
  > Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways. You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform. > It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology. "Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent. In every single comparably wealthy country, the public sector makes up a (stark) minority of the workforce -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se... The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc. In the countries devoid of the kind of opioid deaths you speak of, economic freedom is among the highest, many even higher than the US -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.