Is it RIP for the ‘American Dream’, the founding ideal of the richest nation on earth? Reports of its death have been doing the rounds for decades, but have generally proved much exaggerated. Despite setbacks, America’s capacity to inspire, innovate and grow has always eventually bounced back. Now along comes the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, the British-born Angus Deaton, with some hard evidence of very serious deterioration, if not outright death. With his wife, Anne Case, Deaton has crunched the numbers on mortality and morbidity in the US and found that among middle-aged, white, non-Hispanics, things are not going well at all.
Unlike virtually every other advanced economy, where rates of death and ill-health in this particular cohort have been falling steeply, in the US there has been virtually no progress for 25 years. Worse, the rate has picked up sharply since the turn of the century, and is now far and away the worst among rich, industrialised economies. The chief causes of this reversal are alcohol, drugs and suicide — a shocking finding that looks worryingly indicative of a broken and divided society.
It’s not quite Russia, which has virtually Third World rates of mortality among middle-aged men, but it is getting there. For a large number of non-college-educated white Americans, hope and aspiration have given way to despair and addiction.
There is nothing new about disillusionment with the ‘American Dream’, which has an extensive literary tradition, from Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby to Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman. In Death of a Salesman, Loman’s eventual suicide — prompted by a growing sense of failure and lack of self-worth — is eerily predictive of today’s epidemic of self-harm. America still takes great pride in its reputation as an equal opportunities country, where determination, self-reliance and hard work are all that’s required to succeed. This may always have been something of a myth, but to the extent that it ever was true, it has rarely looked under greater threat. What has gone wrong?
The higher death rate identified by Professor Deaton cannot be entirely blamed on the destructive consequences of the financial crisis; it long pre-dates it, and in any case mortality rates have continued to decline in most European countries, which if anything suffered an even deeper slump. There may be some oddities in the American situation, for instance, in the propensity of US doctors to prescribe much higher dosages of opiates and other painkillers than their European counterparts.
But in the round it is hard to resist the conclusion that these higher mortality rates are mainly about growing economic insecurity. Globalisation has undermined many traditional sources of once secure blue-collar, and even white-collar, work, making many forms of employment much more precarious. High school drop-outs have particularly depressing wage and career prospects.
Earnings and opportunity have continued to grow strongly for the educated and well-trained. But the great hinterland of the unskilled — well they’ve gone nowhere. The progressive advance of intelligent machines threatens only to make a bad situation much worse. According to some estimates, robots will make up to a half of all present manufacturing jobs redundant within 10 years. Economies that fail to plan for such change face ruin. What’s already happening in America will soon be washing up even on Chinese shores. President Barack Obama promised to address these challenges and even fix them, but he’s got nowhere too. The high hopes and expectations vested in him when he took office have been substantially disappointed. Judged by the mortality yardstick — a key indicator of social well-being — things have deteriorated further under his watch. It’s still early days for ObamaCare, which aims to make America’s high standards of health care — for those that can afford it — universally available. But for the moment, the impression is one of muddle, malign unintended consequences and still painfully inadequate cover.
The physical and mental health issues identified by Professor Deaton are, moreover, a time-bomb for future government expenditures, with those now in mid-life likely to age into Medicare in far worse health than the current elderly. To get to grips with these challenges requires the vision of the greats — a Franklin D. Roosevelt or even an Abraham Lincoln. Today’s Band Aid solutions need to be replaced with something akin to a New Deal. The deadbeat presidential hopefuls promise regrettably little chance of that even after Obama has gone. As an economy, the US remains without equal - dynamic, innovative, self-assured and open to change. But it is also one in which a sizeable minority is being left behind. The America that many people grew up with and admired — open, classless and meritocratic — is fast disappearing. No doubt it will continue to thrive and prosper, after a fashion. But as a beacon of hope and moral leadership in an uncertain world? This looks ever more questionable.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
