Steel workers

Bashing European countries and their social and economic programs is a popular pastime among the “American exceptionalists” in right-wing media. But when economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton compare the American working class to the working class in European countries, it is U.S. workers — not European workers — they describe as suffering from “deaths of despair.” And journalists David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson, in an op-ed for the New York Times, draw on Case and Deaton’s data to explain why U.S. workers are more likely to feel worried, pessimistic or stressed out than their counterparts in other developed countries.

Leonhardt and Thompson note that Case and Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair,” first published in 2015, found that “many white working-class Americans in their forties and fifties were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse.”

“But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data,” the Times writers explain, “it became clear that the grim trends didn’t apply only to middle-aged whites. Up and down […]