We've known how to stop the 'Deaths of Despair' crisis gripping America's white working class for 120 years
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Based on Case and Deaton's work, we know that what started as a scourge in the Southwest in the early 2000s has spread to communities across the country. Geography isn't a dominant factor — this isn't a rural or urban problem exclusively. Instead, the problem is a class thing.
It's an identity thing.
And this isn't the first time that social change has caused self-destructiveness on a mass scale. Indeed, 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote about similar problems in his time, and might refer to the plague of white middle-class mortality we see today as "a state of upheaval."
Of course, the lesson of the 2016 presidential election was that working- and middle-class whites are suffering. What Durkheim offers, though, is the argument for why the newly elected government in Washington — voted in by this very constituency — is getting the solution all wrong. The way to fix this problem is not through less government — but through more.
Durkheim's seminal work, the 1897 book "Suicide," remains one of the most in-depth examinations of why these situations occur in society, and it is as relevant as ever. Its lessons are an indication that as a country, we are moving swiftly, carelessly in the wrong direction.
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-deaths-of-despair-crisis-is-gripping-america-2017-3