The Real Cause Of The Opioid Epidemic: Scarcity Of Jobs And Positive Social Roles

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The employment rate for males ages 25-54 has been stairstepping down for 30 years, but it literally fell off a cliff in 2009.

We all know there is a scourge of addiction and premature death plaguing the nation, a scourge that is killing thousands and ruining millions of lives: the deaths resulting from the opioid epidemic (largely the result of "legal" synthetic narcotics) are mounting at an alarming rate:

We also know that the proximate cause of this epidemic is Big Pharma, which promised non-addictive painkillers that lasted for 12 hours but delivered addictive painkillers that did not last 12 hours.

The unsavory truth was reported by the Los Angeles Times last May (2016) in a scathing investigative series: "You Want a Description of Hell?" Oxycontin"s 12-hour problem.

There are plenty of other participants who share responsibility for the public health and law-enforcement disaster: physicians who all too readily passed out prescriptions for powerful synthetic opioids like aspirin; the government agencies that approved the synthetic heroin as "safe" (heh) and paid for their distribution via Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, etc., and the patients who all too willingly accepted the false promises of synthetic opioids.

But what"s missing from the public conversation is the underlying cause of the epidemic: a structural scarcity of paid work and positive social roles for vast swaths of America"s workforce.

We all know what paid work means: jobs. Positive social roles include jobs--supporting oneself and one"s family provides purpose, meaning, identity and a source of pride, all atrributes of positive social roles--but the concept extends beyond work to any role in which the participant feels needed and that offers dignity: this includes volunteer, guardian, mentor, coach, etc., many of which are unpaid.

A significant essay in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs describes The Dignity Deficit: Reclaiming Americans" Sense of Purpose (subscription or registration required)

At its core, to be treated with dignity means being considered worthy of respect. Certain situations bring out a clear, conscious sense of our own dignity: when we receive praise or promotions at work, when we see our children succeed, when we see a volunteer effort pay off and change our neighborhood for the better. We feel a sense of dignity when our own lives produce value for ourselves and others. Put simply, to feel dignified, one must be needed by others.

Giving people welfare, cheap prescriptions for opioids and Universal Basic Income (UBI) does not make them feel needed--it makes them feel superfluous and worthless.

The recent decline in male employment in the peak earning years (ages 25-54) is striking: the employment rate for males ages 25-54 has been stairstepping down for 30 years, but it literally fell off a cliff in 2009. Is it coincidental that the opioid epidemic took off around 2010? I don"t think so.

How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don"t. The males working in two-income families in the top 10% of the work force are doing just fine. It"s the bottom 50% of households that earn a fraction of the top 10% that reflect the decline of paid work for males below the top 20% or so:

The labor force participation rate (percentage of the civilian populace that is in the labor force, i.e. either working or actively seeking employment) has been crashing since 2000.

The participation rate of males has been in structural decine for decades. The entire 30-year boom in employment from 1970 to 2000 bypassed much of the male labor force.

Faced with a scarcity of jobs and social roles that provide the dignity of being needed and productive, people slip into the toxic depths of the opioid epidemic. As I keep saying here, We Need A "Third" Economy, a community economy that provides an abundance of both paid work and positive social roles. I outline such a system in my book A Radically Beneficial World.

Trump's Paradox: To Reach His Economic Targets, The President Would Need A "Dramatic Surge In Immigration"

In what could become an ideological paradox for Donald Trump, according to the ECRI, the president would have no choice but to allow a substantial number of immigrants into the US if he wishes to reach his goal of adding 25 million jobs over the next 8 years as his administration has promised.

As the ECRI calculates without a dramatic surge in immigration – or the number of women joining the labor force – it will be virtually impossible to add 25 million jobs in the next eight years - one of the bedrock economic growth promises of the Trump administration. This is because a key measure of economic health, the number of people participating in the work force (LFPR), that showed positive trends in the 20th century, has been going in the wrong direction largely because fewer women are participating.

The vast majority of baby boomers attained adulthood in the 28 years between the end of President Truman’s last term and the end of President Carter’s term, when male and female populations both grew at about 1.7% per year, on average. But in the next 20 years, until the beginning of the 21st century, the male population grew at only three-quarters of that pace and the female population grew at only two-thirds of that pace. In the 21st century, population growth slowed a bit further (not shown). The point that many appreciate is that overall population growth is well below what it used to be through the waning years of the Carter administration.

But drilling down to gender-related data shows a much more troubling story. Following the end of World War II, almost seven-eighths of the over-16 male population and nearly one-third of the over-16 female population were in the labor force (see chart). However, the LFPR for men has fallen continuously ever since, with the decline speeding up between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, then slowing somewhat until the eve of the Great Recession, around which time it took another step down, ending up at 69%.

In sharp contrast, the LFPR for women kept rising throughout the second half of the 20th century, converging quickly with the male LFPR, and rising rapidly between the mid-1970s and early 1980s — essentially the Carter years and early Reagan years. The pace of increase in the LFPR for women slowed in the 1980s and 1990s, and then peaked just above 60% around the end of the 20th century.

In effect, this convergence between the LFPRs for men and women, which was a critical feature of the 20th century job market, ended in the late 1990s. Only in the wake of the Great Recession did the two LFPRs come a bit closer, but that was just because the men’s participation rate fell even faster than women’s.

Furthermore, with the rising role of technological replacement and obsolescence of unskilled and semi-skilled menial laborers, the natural rate of job creation could be even slower.

As a result, with both the participation rate continuing to decline, to a big extent due to population demograhics, as well as due to a slowdown in the natural growth rate of the organic US population, Trump may have no choice but to open the floodgates to foreigners if he hopes to hit his 25 million bogey.