"The fight by transportation workers against these appalling conditions requires the building of new organizations, independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the Wall Street banks, the Democrats and Republicans. The rational reorganization of the transportation industry calls for a socialist program oriented to the interests of workers and the traveling public, not the profiteering of the banks."
the depression is already here for most of us below the super-rich!
Trump and the GOP created a fake economic boom on our collective credit card: The equivalent of maxing out your credit cards and saying look how good I'm doing right now.
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"Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions."
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"It is significant that what the Financial Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1 trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for stock markets since the global financial crisis."
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"A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died."
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The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce deficits and supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White House says things are working as planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise.
New York taxi drivers driven to penury and suicide
A recently published series of articles by the New York Times has exposed the brutal exploitation of New York City taxi drivers due to predatory lending practices. This, compounded by growing competition from ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, has led to extreme economic stress, nearly a thousand bankruptcies, and at least eight suicides by taxi, limousine, and ride-hailing drivers last year alone.
Much as with the housing mortgage bubble a decade ago, banks and other private lenders used shady and deceptive practices to lure drivers into taking out enormous loans to purchase taxi medallions. Ownership of these city-regulated medallions allows an individual to drive their own cab rather than work as an employee of a corporate fleet, which own large numbers of medallions, and have long been known for corruption and the exploitation of drivers.
In earlier decades purchase of a medallion, the value of which had historically grown at a modest rate, was seen as a sound investment. Through hard work a driver could achieve a relatively decent standard of living.
In recent times, however, the introduction of predatory lending practices by a growing number of companies specializing in “medallion loans” targeting individual cabbies resulted in a boom-and-bust cycle, which has devastated many of the city’s largely immigrant taxi drivers. This was compounded by an influx of other lenders seeking new investment “opportunities” after the 2008 crash drove them out of the real estate market. Some fleet owners intentionally bid up medallion prices in order to inflate the value of their own holdings. Among those who participated in such schemes was Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former attorney. He and his wife owned more than 30 medallions.
These practices greatly inflated the price of medallions, creating a huge bubble which, when it burst, left individual drivers who had purchased the highly over-valued medallions with unsustainable debt. The Times found that from 2002 to 2014 the price of a medallion increased by a factor of five, from $200,000 to over $1 million. Over the same period taxi drivers’ incomes have been stagnant or declined. New York taxi drivers, on average, saw a $10,000 reduction in their yearly earnings between 2013 and 2016, according to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
As prices rose, lenders encouraged borrowers to refinance based on the premise that the trend would continue upward forever, much as with the pre-2008 housing bubble, with no consideration of the borrower’s underlying financial status. Many drivers now owe hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The city itself benefited financially from the inflated prices, using the sale of new medallions as a revenue stream, realizing upward of $855 million from sales and taxes under the administrations of Mayor de Blasio and his predecessor Michael Bloomberg; a thousand new medallions were sold under Bloomberg’s administration. At the same time, government oversight of lending practices was loosened. Meanwhile, reports raising warning flags were ignored as the wealthy profited.
The bubble burst in late 2014, in part under the increasing competitive pressure from ride-hailing services (Uber launched in New York City in 2001). Since then, the price of medallions tumbled to below its 2002 level, leaving the approximately 4,000 drivers who purchased them with mountainous debt and an enormously diminished asset. Nearly a thousand have so far declared bankruptcy, and many more may soon follow.
This was, in effect, a Ponzi scheme in which the lenders deliberately inflated prices. They lured unsuspecting drivers, many of them immigrants with limited English-language skills, with the prospect of being their own boss. However, victims were not warned of the debt-trap they were entering.
According to the Times, “The investigation found example after example of drivers trapped in exploitative loans, including hundreds who signed interest-only loans that required them to pay exorbitant fees, forfeit their legal rights and give up almost all their monthly income, indefinitely.” Lenders snowed borrowers under with a blizzard of added charges. “Rather than raising interest rates, they made borrowers pay a mix of costs—origination fees, legal fees, financing fees, refinancing fees, filing fees, fees for paying too late and fees for paying too early, according to a Times review of more than 500 loans included in legal cases.”
Loans also included a “balloon” clause whereby the interest rate would increase to as high as 24 percent if the loan wasn’t repaid in three years.
Lenders profited at both ends. First, by sucking profits from drivers’ debt payments, then, as prices collapsed, by purchasing hundreds of medallions at cut-rate prices from bankrupt drivers while sending debt collectors to extract whatever other assets the drivers might have.
Similar practices spread to cities across the country.
Lenders have denied wrongdoing, despite the striking similarities with the predatory practices that led to the financial crisis of 2008. And the city, which regulates the taxi industry via its Taxi and Limousine Commission, also denies responsibility, despite the fact that a 2010 study prepared for the city warned of the growing bubble.
The New York State attorney general recently launched an investigation into lending practices in the industry. And the city has now announced its own inquiry. Little can be expected from such actions, undertaken by agencies that allowed these practices to go on unhindered for years.
Drivers for ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, also suffer extreme exploitation, as highlighted by the world-wide strike in early May. The strike was an international event with rideshare drivers participating in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, France, Nigeria, Kenya, Chile, Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Uruguay and other countries, emphasizing the shared experience of workers facing a common enemy.
Uber is deliberately lowering driver earnings in order to maximize the projected stock windfall for investors. The company announced a further 25 percent cut in driver compensation per mile last winter, with Uber now taking an average 33 percent in commission for each ride. Drivers in the US, who are treated as independent contractors, average a poverty wage of $10 to $12 per hour, with few if any benefits. One Uber driver in New York City told the World Socialist Web Site that he works 100 hours a week and averages less than $14 an hour in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
The similarity of conditions facing taxi, livery, and ride-hailing drivers is illustrated by the note posted on Facebook by Doug Schifter, 61, a limousine driver who committed suicide last year: “I worked 100-120 consecutive hours almost every week for the past fourteen-plus years. When the industry started in 1981, I averaged 40-50 hours. I cannot survive any longer with working 120 hours!” “This is SLAVERY NOW. … I don’t know how else to try to make a difference other than a public display of a most private affair.”
One cabbie, Roy Kim, 58, who hanged himself last November, had bought a medallion the year before and was more than half a million dollars in debt.
An Uber driver, Fausto Luna, also 58, who was deeply in debt, committed suicide last October by throwing himself in front of a subway train.
Reports indicate that Uber has been collaborating with car dealers and financiers to push their drivers into purchasing vehicles under exorbitant terms similar to the predatory lending practices to which taxi drivers have been subject. Meanwhile, the recent Initial Public Offerings (IPO) of Uber and Lyft raised billions of dollars for each company.
The bursting of the medallion price bubble was due to a convergence of a number of factors. The growth of ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft, which have taken significant market share, has been compounded by the city’s significant increase in the sale of medallions, putting more taxis on the street. The result is the pitting of one section of the working class against another, causing extreme economic and emotional stress.
Under these conditions, the unscrupulous lending policies, which astronomically inflated the price of medallions, was inevitably destined to cause a collapse. Just as with the housing bubble, prices could not continue rising forever, with devastating consequences for the working class. Just as in 2008, while the corporate gangsters will be rescued, the big business politicians will do nothing to alleviate the suffering of the victims of these crimes.
The fight by transportation workers against these appalling conditions requires the building of new organizations, independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the Wall Street banks, the Democrats and Republicans. The rational reorganization of the transportation industry calls for a socialist program oriented to the interests of workers and the traveling public, not the profiteering of the banks.
Suicide rates for doctors and young physicians among highest in the US
population
Audio Transcript
An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis
Suicide rates for doctors and young physicians among highest in the US
population
Doctors in the United States confront a high suicide rate as a
result of stressful working conditions and excessively long work hours.
Director and chairman of the Southern California Permanente
Medical Group, Dr. Edward Wilson, told CNBC that it is estimated that one
doctor dies every day by suicide in the US due to “stress and rigorous work
schedules.”
Doctors and health professionals within the US, according to
Ellison, are “stressed to the breaking point” due to stifling work schedules
and mounting pressures that stem from patient care.
Depression, the primary cause of suicidal ideation, affects an
estimated 12 percent of male physicians and 19.5 percent of female physicians,
but doctors are often hesitant to seek treatment due to the stigma associated
with mental health problems.
As a result, doctors have the highest suicide rate among any
profession in the country: 28 to 40 per 100,000 persons compared to 12.3 per
100,000 for the general population.
According to Ellison, recent data shows that 44 percent of
physicians show signs of physical and emotional exhaustion, or “burnout,” which
can lead to further mental health problems as doctors have difficulty
adequately taking care for themselves, such as eating and sleeping properly.
Changes made to the way hospitals and medical centers operate in
recent years may have improved the efficiency of the American healthcare
system, but at the cost of longer and more exhaustive work schedules for
doctors. Doctors are now spending less time with patients in traditional care
settings and more time fulfilling extraneous tasks traditionally performed by
adjunct staff and employees.
As a result, the suicide rate among physicians has exploded in
recent decades. The suicide rate among male and female physicians is 1.41 and
2.27 times higher than that of the general male and female population,
respectively.
For example, Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a renowned surgeon from Washington
D.C., hung himself in 2015 after taking his son to school. He had struggled his
entire life with anxiety and a severe form of insomnia, which afforded him
little time to sleep before operating on and treating patients.
Just days before he committed suicide and in the face of growing
personal turmoil, his psychiatrist prescribed two new drugs which merely
exacerbated his anxiety and insomnia and even led to paranoia. After he was
told that he would need medication for the rest of his life, he concluded that
he could never live a normal life again and decided to kill himself.
High suicide rates are also prevalent among medical students.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for medical students. They are
three times more likely to kill themselves than their peers in the same age
group. As many as 30 percent of medical students suffer from depression.
The work schedules for young doctors transitioning from medical
school, customarily referred to as “residents,” are extremely onerous. Residents
are expected to work up to 80 hours a week with single shifts that can last up
to 28 hours.
These grueling schedules are largely the result of the
centralized matching system for residency applicants in the hospital labor
market and the monopoly held by a handful of hospital chains. Although
employer-controlled labor markets are typically prohibited by anti-trust laws,
the system remains the only avenue for residents to become fully licensed
doctors.
Centralized matching, commonly referenced as “the match,” allows
a handful of employers to select residency applicants without them having any
legal right or ability to negotiate the terms of their contracts. This grants
hospital conglomerates free rein to implement excessive hours and lower pay.
In 2002, a group of residency students filed a lawsuit against
the for-profit selection system, deeming it an unlawful “contract” or
“conspiracy” designed to undermine federal antitrust laws. After a federal
district court initially ruled that “the match” may be illegal and give an
unfair advantage to healthcare institutions, Congress passed legislation
immunizing medical training programs from antitrust lawsuits.
Thus, residency programs give hospital employers access to a
well-educated, but super-exploited and over-burdened workforce. As a 2017
article in The Atlantic noted,
“while residency-program administrators no doubt take their educational
obligations seriously, residents are also a cheap source of skilled labor that
can fill gaps in coverage.” Resident salaries are generally equivalent to those
of the hospital cleaning staff and about half of what nurse practitioners get
paid even though residents typically work much longer hours.
The long hours residents are compelled to work causes tremendous
physical and psychological stress. In response, the Accreditation Council for
Graduate Medical Education (AGGME) implemented a “duty-hour” reform policy in
2003, which lowered the maximum weekly hospital working hours from 120 to 80
and the length of single shifts from 48 to 28 hours.
However, this change did little to lessen the severity of
residents’ schedules. Surveys show that the reforms led to virtually no changes
in work and sleep hours.
A large reason behind the failure of the reforms is that
hospitals have not increased the rate of new hires to keep up with the rising
demands of healthcare operations. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of patients
admitted to teaching hospitals rose 46 percent, but the number of residency
spots only increased 13 percent.
SUICIDE IN AMERICA
May 29, 2019
The Social Order
Kay
Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian
Anderson to
discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the
world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue, “Alone,” will be
released online this Sunday.
“Americans
are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering
social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising
numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ suggest a profound, collective discontent.”
Evidence
of the loneliness epidemic is dramatic in other countries, too. Japan, for
example, has seen a troubling rise in “lonely deaths.” The challenge, Hymowitz
says, is to teach younger generations the importance of family and community
before they make decisions that will further isolate them.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blogs podcast. This is
Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Kay
Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime
contributing editor at the magazine. Her latest piece in City Journal is called
“Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.”
That's the subtitle. It's one of the great pieces she's ever written in City
Journal and I encourage you to find it on our website. Lastly, just one more
announcement. We created a new email address for the show, so if listeners want
to get in touch and drop a comment or share an idea, you can now email us
at podcast@city-journal.org. That's podcast@city-journal.org. That's it for the
introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Kay Hymowitz.
Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian Anderson,
the editor of City Journal and joining us in the studio now is Kay Hymowitz.
She's a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan
Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @KayHymowitz. And she's the author of
many books, most recently the New Brooklyn: What It Takes to
Bring a City Back, which came out in 2017. And prior to that, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, which came out in 2011.
We're here today though to talk about her latest piece in City Journal called
Alone. Kay, thanks very much for joining us.
Kay Hymowitz: I'm happy to be here, Brian.
Brian Anderson: So let's just start off. What made you want
to write about the topic of loneliness, and what is the state of loneliness in
America?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, let me start by saying I didn't
actually set out to write about loneliness. I knew it was a great topic, but I
wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. And I stumbled across an article that
inspired me by two social scientists, I think they're demographers. And they
described something called a rise of kinlessness, that is a rise in the number
of people who have no kin, older people who have no kin. And it was very eye
opening and I began to see that the breakdown of the family that I've been
studying for maybe 15 years now and that I had mostly talked about in relation
to its impact on children was also having quite an impact on older people,
particularly aging adults. And that some of the despair that we were hearing
about, the deaths of despair, the opioid crisis and so on so forth, are
actually disproportionately made up of divorced and single, well, of men, in
particular. So I realized that we're looking at something big here in terms of
the family breakdown and its ultimate impact is something that I hadn't quite
foreseen or thought of.
Brian Anderson: It's probably worth rehearsing some of the
numbers in terms of this breakdown in family. Divorce rates for married
couples, I think, are probably double what they were back in the 50s.
Kay Hymowitz: They are indeed.
Brian Anderson: But in some ways the picture's even darker. You
have a 40% of kids, I think, are born to unmarried mothers now. That's up from
5% in 1960. And strikingly the rate of women who don't give birth at all, I
think, has doubled or is much higher. Yeah. And you could go on and on in this
vein. This is obviously the core of your argument that's having a big impact on
loneliness and kinlessness and this whole phenomenon. So say a bit more about
that and what do you think is driving it?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, I think that a lot of what's
happening is due to a change in our understanding of what the family is, what
its purpose is. I talk a lot in the article about the beginnings of what I see
is the unraveling of the family, or shall we say, a kind of assault on, on the
traditional family. I want to clarify that as we go on. I see the beginnings of
it in something that demographers call the Second Demographic Transition. We
sometimes talk about the, in ordinary parlance, we talk about the 60s or the
Sexual Revolution. But those were actually an American reflection of something
that has, as I said, demographers have been studying. The second demographic
transition they believe is partly the result of affluence as he, as the
societies in the west in particular, but also over time Japan and others, as
they got richer, families were not as essential to mere survival as they had
one been. Now this was intensified this fact by the introduction of the birth
control pill, obviously because you could control sexual reproduction without
worrying about whether you're married or not. And what the theory is that this
would introduce a different set of values, anti-authoritarian, and little bit
of anti-tradition. Individualistic. As people began to see they could be freer
to find other ways of living than to depend entirely on family or depend mostly
on their families. And in fact, following the second demographic transition,
um, there was a huge increase as you, just as you just pointed out in your
numbers in the percentage of divorces, the percentage of non-marital births.
And this by the way, is not just true in the United States, but in other
developed countries. Not all of them, but many. And also of fatherlessness. So
I think that these ideas that emerged with affluence and the second demographic
transition made it possible for people to think very differently about how they
were going to live. And I should say now, because I'll be talking about the
downsides of this, what followed from the second demographic transition. But it
did really give people a lot of freedom. And there's no question that there
were many people for relieved from very miserable and even violent marriages.
As a result of the second demographic transition. There were many different
ways to think about letting the people, it was possible to not be married if
you really didn't want to. Which I think has worked nicely for some
individuals. And of course it opened up the door to gay marriage, for much more
freedom for gays and lesbians. So there is a tremendous upside and I don't want
to discount that. But what I try to do in this article or show that there's
some real downsides that we haven't quite understood.
Brian Anderson: What are some of those downsides? Why is it a
problem for society that people are increasingly alone? And what are some of
the manifestations of that that are negative?
Kay Hymowitz: Right. So one of the things that I try to
do in the article is to remind people that kinship, those close family
relations, blood and marital relations, have been kind of the linchpin of
societies practically since we came out of the caves. It is absolutely
fundamental to every society. The relationship between kin and what it does
is... Those relationships define certain kinds of obligations. We tend to be
more protective of kin and to understand our roles better when in relation to
kin. Everything else, all of our other relationships may be very important to
us, but we're making those up pretty much as we go along. And the kinship... As
we've sort of gotten rid of that basic building block, or we've sort of
undermined it through the divorce revolution, the sexual revolution in the
second demographic transition, we've undermined the way kin work. So one point
I make is that there's been a huge rise in cohabitation and particularly among
less educated and lower income people. Cohabitation has become a kind of
substitute for marriage. And the hope among, social scientists and sociologists
and economists was always that gradually people would realize that you could
cohabit, but you really ought to stay together. That it would be a kind of it,
that it would be a kind of marriage or marriage light. But in fact, that's not
what's happened. What's happened is that the, the norm of cohabitation is much
more transitory, impermanent, fragile, and unpredictable. And those couples who
were cohabitating and do not go onto marry tend to break up much, much more
quickly.
Brian Anderson: This is even true when they have children?
Kay Hymowitz: Oh yes, definitely. The children of
cohabiting couples are having a very, very different upbringing than the
children of married couples. Now, it's true. we do have higher rates of divorce
than we used to, although it's stabilized. And one of the reasons it's
stabilized is that so many people are not getting married anymore, they are
cohabiting. The upshot is that there are an awful lot of children, as I've
pointed out many times before growing up in very unstable environments, but
then an awful lot of parents, particularly men, who are losing direct contact
with their kids. Now most men, after a divorce or after a child out of marriage,
try to maintain some contact. But that tends to, it's not always true, that
tends to fade out over time. Remember a lot of the people who are cohabiting,
having children as their cohabiting are young, and understandably if that
relationship doesn't work out, that go on and seek out another one. Well, what
often happens is that there is a new family that develops out of that second
union and possibly even a third or forth. So the child is faced with a, and
fathers too, are faced with this rolling cast of people, none of whom have
quite the connection of the kin of the old fashioned can relationships so that
those men are frequently on their own as they get older. And if I could just
add a little personal observation here that some people might not agree with,
men just don't make homes or, you know make even make friends quite the way
that women do. And we do have some data on this as well.
Brian Anderson: Looking around the world, and you noted this
earlier, we know that the US isn't the only country facing problems of
loneliness. One of the most striking examples in your story is Japan, which was
seen just an incredible rise in what they call "lonely deaths." Maybe
you could describe a little bit the situation there and how Japan is dealing with
it?
Kay Hymowitz: Japan is an interesting contrast. to the
United States in some ways in other western countries because non marital
childbearing, single motherhood is relatively rare, unlike here. And also
divorce is, relatively rare. It's getting, it's getting more common. What's
happening instead is that an awful lot of people are not having children, so
therefore their fertility rates are very, very low.
Brian Anderson: Well below replacement rate, I believe?
Kay Hymowitz: Well below replacement. Ours are low, but
this is lower. I read one a social Japanese social scientists who said that the
basic concept of the family in Japan is dead. So there's an awful lot of
elderly people on their own, living alone. And by the way, dependent on the
state to support them because they don't have any family to speak of. Or their
family has moved away, or is extremely busy with work. We know that the
Japanese are workaholics. But they started to see this rise in lonely deaths,
which, we're beginning to see here too. And it became such a phenomenon in
Japan that the newspapers started to cover, local newspapers would start to
cover these stories that were happening very frequently. And in addition, this
was the part that kind of, caused me to sit up and wonder. There are businesses
now, there are cleanup companies, to take care of apartments after a lonely
death because what happens is that when somebody dies and they're alone and
nobody's really watching out for them, they often die in their apartment.
Nobody knows they're dead. Nobody finds them until the telltale smell of
decaying body. And it makes a huge mess for building owners or landlords. So
they've started these companies, these cleanup companies. And I believe I
mentioned the name of one of them, which is kind of grim. It's called Next.
Brian Anderson: Yeah.
Kay Hymowitz: But these companies, there are a fair
number of them and they've become an essential, essential part of Japanese
life.
Brian Anderson: It's a very, very grim reality. I've been reading
a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, and it's an argument
against being immersed in social media and other forms of technologically
driven distraction. He says, we need to set more time for our sanity sake to be
alone or at least off of the Internet and this constant bombardment of, of
connection with other people. In other words, he's saying technology is making
us constantly exposed to other people in ways that can harm us. At least if it
goes too far. How does social media and the constant judgment that people
sometimes feel themselves under through social media if they're participating
in it, how does that intersect with the argument that you're making?
Kay Hymowitz: Well social media, I'm thinking of Facebook
in particular was supposed to bring us all together. Right? It was the social
network. We were going to create all these new social networks and you know, I
think some people have been able to use it that way. I have ordered up to make
contact with old high school friends or whatever, but it has also added to a
sense of anxiety as people post pictures of their happy family occasions. They
can look like things are just so wonderful and peachy keen for everybody else
while you're feeling down in the dumps. So what does that expression,
"fomo," fear of missing out? You're missing parties that you might've
been invited to... People are taking wonderful trips that you, you know, don't
have anybody to travel with or whatever. So I think it can exacerbate
loneliness in that way because you're constantly comparing yourself to other
people at their peak moments because that's when people post their pictures.
And there is something about, aside from the fomo, aside from that, the kinds
of connections you make through social media don't seem to be the same as those
should make in real life. I haven't seen wonderful research on this yet, but it
seems to me an area ripe for exploration. It seems so clear somehow that you
can be online, communicating, even playing games with people, from all over the
world, and seemingly making new friends and still feel quite lonely and be
lonely because you turn off the computer or walk into another room and you're
alone.
Brian Anderson: A lot's been written, especially since the
election of Donald Trump, about the state of rust belt communities. The opioid
crisis, which you mentioned earlier. How much in your view is the family
breakdown you're describing having an impact on those communities? And is it
part of what's causing the problem or is it an outgrowth of the breakdown in
those communities? Economic breakdown.
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah, there's no question that family
breakdown exacerbates and intensifies the loss of these communities, or rather
the jobs, the factories that have left. If you lose your job and you lose your
wife or husband because to opioids, or they've just left, then you've got real
trouble. You don't have anybody to support you through difficult times. One of
the things I argue in that piece is that the breakdown in the family has not
affected educated and well off people anywhere near to the extent that it
has... well, blacks, and also now the white working class that came a little
bit later. And I think what we underestimated, we who lived through the second
demographic transition and played a role in pushing it actually because I was
in college in the 1960s when a lot of these ideas were being tested out and
promulgated. If the educated classes, the more well to do classes, were able to
figure out a way to maintain their families, what they didn't anticipate, or
that none of us anticipated, was that it would be much harder for people who
were living more on the edge, who had evictions to worry about or layoffs or a
factory closing. You need, in those cases, a culture that really supports, a
cultural environment, that really supports the idea of the family and of
kinship as people... as people that are there for you in hard times.
Brian Anderson: Providing a network of support...
Kay Hymowitz: That's right. That's right. And in those
communities instead, we saw a more and more of a collapse of the family. Now
was it possible that, we could have, in a different cultural environment, it
could have been different? Maybe, maybe. It's very hard to disentangle the
cause and effect here, but there's no question that they go hand... the loss of
the working class or the manufacturing jobs, has definitely been related to the
breakdown of the family in the working class. Now I should mention that one of the
things that's happened as a result, well, related again to the breakdown of the
family in those communities, is this opioid crisis. Opioids, as you may know,
is now killing more people than traffic accidents, than car accidents. And I
was amazed to see in a recent study that the victims or the people who die of
opioid death are much more likely to be single, unmarried or divorced men. And
that speaks of exactly what I've been trying to describe. I think that women
are better at creating their own social networks. This was something that the
sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book called Going Solo, about people
living alone. It's something he noticed as he started to interview people who
were living alone. Even among the elderly women were more likely to want to
live alone. They didn't want to remarry if there were widowed or divorced. But
who kept fairly rich lives, they were still able to... they volunteered. They
had friends, networks of friends that they could go out with, and that sort of
thing. So, and if there were children, they were closer to the kids than a
single father. So they had all those supports. Men seem to suffer much more
loneliness than women. And you know, we can debate from here to eternity why
that is. But there it is.
Brian Anderson: Well, to ask a final question, and it's how you
conclude your piece: What might be necessary to start re-knitting the social
fabric in a way that might address this problem. You mentioned Tom Wolfe's idea
of a "Great Re-learning." Say a little bit about that?
Kay Hymowitz: Well first, I should say that there are a lot of
government programs for seniors, a lot of, on the federal level and the city
and local level. There are all kinds of ways that civil society jumps in.
Seniors Helping Seniors is one group, Meals on Wheels, organizations like that.
They are absolutely essential and beneficial and I don't want to knock them at
all, but they don't begin to address the loss that a lot of people are feeling,
or the loneliness. So one of the things that struck me in thinking about all
this was how much joy and pleasure so many of my friends, and I should say I'm
70 years old, so many of my friends now with grandchildren, would mostly worry
when their kids were growing up about their careers. They would focus so much
on their education. Starting from early on, we were the beginning of helicopter
parents, not quite as bad as today, but it did begin quite a while ago. But
never talking about this other, what I consider to be the other big goal in
life: to find a spouse, a kind and reliable and giving spouse who will make a
good mother or father for your children. Because most people are going to want
children. And society's depend on them wanting children. Those parents didn't
talk to their kids about these things. And yet here I was going to weddings and
watching these grandchildren being born and the parents were going nuts. I
thought, well, why wouldn't they ever talk about the joy of this stage of life
and of the connection that we now have with our children. And this is one
lovely thing of the that has followed the second demographic transition is, I
think, there's a much, much less of a generation gap between me and my kids
then there was between me and my own parents because,
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think that's true.
Kay Hymowitz: And there's a kind of companionship and
friendship that I didn't see in my day so much. We have that, and it's a source
of great comfort and pleasure. I think for most of the people that are able to
experience it. So I note all that because I want readers to realize that this
is something we don't talk about to our kids very much. And so we have another
generation, growing up, who have never heard those words or any of those
concepts from their parents or from anybody.
Brian Anderson: Well maybe it's a time for a different kind of
conversation. In any case, don't forget to check out Kay's brilliant essay in
City Journal, it's called Alone. It's in our latest issue you can find it on
our website and we will link to it in the description. You can follow Kay on
Twitter @KayHymowitz. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @CityJournal
and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI, and always, if you like what you've heard on
the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and thanks,
Kay Hymowitz, for joining us.
EYE ON THE NEWS
An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis
Opioids are fueling
homelessness on the West Coast.
June 14, 2019
The Social Order
California
By latest
count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in
California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has
generated headlines and speculation
about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies
have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets.
Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the
same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing
shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual
abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans.
These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West
Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.
Homelessness
is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors
and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of
the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and
fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid
addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California
(concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered
population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages
are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80
percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers
must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.
For
drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the
business
of supplying homeless addicts with
heroin,
fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is
extremely
lucrative. According
to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834
in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total
business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless
population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels,
Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery
of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling
to get people off the streets.
West Coast
cities are seeing a crime spike associated with
homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated
criminal rings engaged
in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in
possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a
sword). Police believe that “apartments
were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and
facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug
dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal
encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where
property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two
years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs
that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines.
Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his
RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”
What are
local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have
adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her #SeattleForAll public relations
campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle
with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as
well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for
opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.
The
consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast
has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619
million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative
care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug
naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and
recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city
has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by
permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless
individuals from outside Los Angeles County.
No
matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects,
homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to
afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these
intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common
denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have
any hope of solving it.
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