Latest / Trumponomics / Death and Despair in White America
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: White working class Americans are dying. If there's one socio
- 0:05Speaker 1: economic issue that cuts hard into the socio part of
- 0:08Speaker 1: that word and also probably played a key role in
- 0:12Speaker 1: electing Donald Trump as president, this is it. And Case
- 0:17Speaker 1: and Angus Deaton, the married academic couple who brought this
- 0:20Speaker 1: issue to the forefront, have just issued a follow up
- 0:23Speaker 1: paper that tries to provide some answers on why death
- 0:27Speaker 1: rates among less educated white Americans have skyrocketed in the
- 0:31Speaker 1: past fifteen years. That's right, and we're about to speak
- 0:35Speaker 1: with Professor Case to discuss her work. You know, we
- 0:38Speaker 1: usually don't think about economics as a life or death matter,
- 0:42Speaker 1: but for a large group of Americans, there's no other
- 0:45Speaker 1: way to describe it. It's Bloomberg Benchmark, a podcast about
- 0:57Speaker 1: the global economy. I'm Daniel Moss, executive editor for Economics
- 1:02Speaker 1: at Bloomberg in New York, and I'm Scott Lanman and
- 1:05Speaker 1: economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington. Dan, you know,
- 1:09Speaker 1: we've covered this issue several times before, and it really
- 1:12Speaker 1: is one of the most important issues that we can
- 1:15Speaker 1: discuss in our roles as economic journalists. We've done the
- 1:19Speaker 1: micro version of this issue with our interview with J. D. Vance,
- 1:23Speaker 1: the author of Hillbilly Elegy. We've even had our guest
- 1:27Speaker 1: and case on the show before, but it's really worthy
- 1:31Speaker 1: of returning now to the macro issue that she and
- 1:34Speaker 1: her husband have studied so well, and Scott we haven't
- 1:37Speaker 1: heard the end of it. J D. E. Vance was
- 1:39Speaker 1: in the news just recently. He's returning to a hire
- 1:43Speaker 1: where much of the book is set, where it's going
- 1:45Speaker 1: to be involved in, among other things, looking for venture
- 1:49Speaker 1: capital ideas from the local community. All right, Well, now
- 1:53Speaker 1: to our guest and case as Professor of Economics and
- 1:56Speaker 1: Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she is the rector
- 2:00Speaker 1: of the Research Program in Development Studies. Among her many
- 2:04Speaker 1: honors is being awarded the Kenneth j. Arrow Prize and
- 2:06Speaker 1: Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association. As we mentioned,
- 2:11Speaker 1: she was on our podcast almost a year ago, and
- 2:14Speaker 1: we're very glad to have her back again today joining
- 2:17Speaker 1: us from Princeton, New Jersey. Hello. Anne, Hi, it's good
- 2:20Speaker 1: to be with you. So you finished the previous paper
- 2:25Speaker 1: on this topic, I think almost two years ago. What
- 2:28Speaker 1: kinds of findings do you have now that you didn't
- 2:31Speaker 1: have before? We really wanted to drill down UM into
- 2:36Speaker 1: the into the question of what is it that is
- 2:40Speaker 1: killing these people either slowly with alcohol or with drugs,
- 2:44Speaker 1: or quickly with a gun. And UM, what we found
- 2:48Speaker 1: was a really strong UM synchronization between these death rates
- 2:54Speaker 1: and all sorts of other dysfunction for whites with less
- 2:58Speaker 1: than a college degree. So I think the first the
- 3:01Speaker 1: first big difference is that we've actually focused a lot
- 3:05Speaker 1: more of our attention to people who haven't gone to college. UM.
- 3:10Speaker 1: People with the B A are continuing to see their
- 3:13Speaker 1: UM mortality rates drop UM, while people with less than
- 3:18Speaker 1: a B A. So that's even people with some college
- 3:20Speaker 1: but not a four year degree, are having a much
- 3:24Speaker 1: harder time. They report poorer health, they report more pain,
- 3:29Speaker 1: the report that UM, they have a lot more social anxiety.
- 3:33Speaker 1: They're a lot less likely to get married. UH. They
- 3:37Speaker 1: their cohabitations are are fragile. UM. And we think though
- 3:42Speaker 1: the root cause of this could be and this is again,
- 3:46Speaker 1: you know, this is just that it's consistent with the
- 3:48Speaker 1: evidence that from the time they left high school and
- 3:54Speaker 1: entered the labor market, their labor market opportunities are really
- 3:58Speaker 1: much poorer than the generation that came before, and professor case.
- 4:03Speaker 1: And we're not just talking about a mortality rate that's
- 4:08Speaker 1: rising while others in the United States fall. There's a
- 4:11Speaker 1: global phenomenon whereby mortality rates are falling in some of
- 4:16Speaker 1: the most unlikely places. Yet for this group of Americans,
- 4:20Speaker 1: it's going in the wrong direction. Throughout the developing world,
- 4:23Speaker 1: mortality rates um are falling, income levels are by and
- 4:28Speaker 1: large rising. But it's just not this group is alone,
- 4:31Speaker 1: not just in the United States, but really in the planet,
- 4:36Speaker 1: well certainly in the rich world. Um. You could name
- 4:39Speaker 1: me your favorite European country and I could pretty much
- 4:42Speaker 1: guarantee you that over this period that mortality rates in
- 4:46Speaker 1: middle age were falling at about two percent a year.
- 4:50Speaker 1: And that's the that is the rate that used to
- 4:52Speaker 1: characterize the white working class that we're talking about. So
- 4:57Speaker 1: terrific progress against heart disease anti hypertensive has just made
- 5:01Speaker 1: a huge difference. People stopped smoking, so both heart disease
- 5:06Speaker 1: and cancer rates fell. But two things happened to this group.
- 5:10Speaker 1: One is that we stopped making progress on heart disease.
- 5:15Speaker 1: So heart disease mortality flatlined after decades of progress. And
- 5:22Speaker 1: because it flatlined, it brought to light the fact that
- 5:26Speaker 1: mortality from these causes causes that the medical community has
- 5:30Speaker 1: a much harder time knowing how to deal with. UM
- 5:33Speaker 1: actually drove mortality rates overall up, and life expectancy came
- 5:39Speaker 1: down in the US, and it came down because of
- 5:42Speaker 1: this group. Children are doing well, the elderly are doing well,
- 5:46Speaker 1: but middle aged whites are actually having a hard enough
- 5:51Speaker 1: time now that it's UM affected overall life expectancy. Now,
- 5:56Speaker 1: one thing you do in your latest paper that wasn't
- 5:59Speaker 1: in the previous one is, uh, look around the United
- 6:03Speaker 1: States and talk about how this phenomenon is common across
- 6:07Speaker 1: almost all geographies in the United States, with white Americans
- 6:14Speaker 1: with less than a bachelor degree having higher death rates
- 6:18Speaker 1: than before. Is it possible to disaggregate this phenomenon from
- 6:23Speaker 1: geography at all? Is there any difference in mortality rates
- 6:26Speaker 1: between urban and rural areas. I know, Uh, there's a
- 6:31Speaker 1: handful of exceptions to this trend, as you pointed out, Scott,
- 6:36Speaker 1: Are you really asking whether it's concentrated in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
- 6:42Speaker 1: and Michigan. Well, it's really the it's most those happened
- 6:45Speaker 1: to be Trump states, but it's really all over the country.
- 6:47Speaker 1: I mean, you pointed out Utah, but was there any
- 6:50Speaker 1: any differences that you could tell. It's interesting because the
- 6:53Speaker 1: press is picked it up in different ways. UM let
- 6:57Speaker 1: me let me not answer the question immediately, but is
- 7:00Speaker 1: to say that, um, a lot of the headlines are
- 7:03Speaker 1: dying white men, and indeed that is true. Some of
- 7:07Speaker 1: the headlines want to focus on the fact that it's
- 7:09Speaker 1: happening to women, and that's happening too, but it's it's
- 7:12Speaker 1: really not a difference between men and women. It's really
- 7:16Speaker 1: the difference cuts between education groups and and some of
- 7:20Speaker 1: the headlines also want to make it a story about Appalachia,
- 7:24Speaker 1: and it's certainly happening there. But there's no part of
- 7:27Speaker 1: the country that has not been touched by this. And
- 7:31Speaker 1: so we are hoping in the next ranche of research
- 7:34Speaker 1: that we do to use the fact that we've divided
- 7:36Speaker 1: the country up into about a thousand small areas, and
- 7:40Speaker 1: we're hoping that we can piece this together better in
- 7:43Speaker 1: terms of local economic conditions. That work still remains to
- 7:47Speaker 1: be done, but I can I can tell you that
- 7:49Speaker 1: for say, whites in age forty five to fifty four,
- 7:53Speaker 1: there are only three states in the country where mortality
- 7:56Speaker 1: rates fell between say, and those were California, New York,
- 8:02Speaker 1: and New Jersey. Was there any reason for that that
- 8:05Speaker 1: you figured out yet or is that for your next
- 8:07Speaker 1: part of research. There's more work to be done on that.
- 8:10Speaker 1: There's also a small piece of the corridor between Dan
- 8:16Speaker 1: and Washington, UM that goes all the way through New
- 8:19Speaker 1: York and up to Boston, and we think that that's
- 8:22Speaker 1: been protected by the fact that along that Northeast corridor
- 8:28Speaker 1: educational attainment is much higher. But I want to go
- 8:31Speaker 1: back also to the question about Europe, because UM, many
- 8:35Speaker 1: countries in Europe were terribly hit by the Great Recession,
- 8:39Speaker 1: right we think about Spain UM being so hard hit.
- 8:43Speaker 1: But during the recession and to the end of the recession,
- 8:47Speaker 1: actually mortality rates fell in Spain and in Italy and
- 8:53Speaker 1: in Greece, and they fell in the countries that weren't
- 8:56Speaker 1: hard hit too. So UM doesn't look like the Great
- 9:01Speaker 1: Recession actually had the kind of um effect that we
- 9:05Speaker 1: saw in the US. But actually it was. It was
- 9:08Speaker 1: already well entrenched in the US before the Great Recession
- 9:11Speaker 1: ever hit. What role does the expanded social safety net
- 9:15Speaker 1: that many people associated with Western European countries played in
- 9:19Speaker 1: that divergence. That is a very good question, and again
- 9:24Speaker 1: this is something that's going to be a focus of
- 9:27Speaker 1: our attention and the next part of the work here.
- 9:30Speaker 1: I don't have a good answer for you yet. It
- 9:33Speaker 1: could be some combination of universal healthcare and stronger safety
- 9:37Speaker 1: nets that protect people when they lose their jobs, UM,
- 9:41Speaker 1: that actually make sure that there's money to keep body
- 9:44Speaker 1: and sold together. UM. It could be that that's why
- 9:48Speaker 1: when the Great Recession hit Europe, we didn't see the
- 9:51Speaker 1: same thing happen. But I can't tell you that that's
- 9:56Speaker 1: what happened for sure, because if you look in the US,
- 9:59Speaker 1: blacks and a spa annex face the same social safety
- 10:02Speaker 1: net that whites do, and yet mortality rates continue to
- 10:05Speaker 1: fall for blacks and Hispanics in the US. Do other
- 10:08Speaker 1: countries have the same prevalence of the opioid epidemic that
- 10:11Speaker 1: we have in the States? No, indeed, I mean, and
- 10:15Speaker 1: that's we think of the opioids as being a real
- 10:17Speaker 1: accelerant to what happened. Although death rates were rising from suicide,
- 10:22Speaker 1: drug overdose, and alcohol related liver diseases well before the
- 10:28Speaker 1: introduction of very strong um prescription opioids in the US market,
- 10:35Speaker 1: so we can we can go all the way back
- 10:37Speaker 1: to and look what was happening, and the trend really
- 10:42Speaker 1: didn't change much with the introduction, for example, of OxyContin,
- 10:46Speaker 1: although it did pick up some. So we do think
- 10:49Speaker 1: that it's an accelerant, but we don't think it's a
- 10:52Speaker 1: root cause of what's going on. I was in the
- 10:54Speaker 1: audience when Professor Dayton presented to the National Association for
- 10:59Speaker 1: Business ECONOLS in d C earlier this month. He highlighted
- 11:03Speaker 1: the relative decline in the strength of trade unionism and
- 11:08Speaker 1: in traditional religion meaning Catholic Church, the Protestant Church versus
- 11:14Speaker 1: a new wave of religion that was very individual in
- 11:17Speaker 1: its focus. Can you talk a bit about that. Yeah,
- 11:20Speaker 1: we're we're actually looking at what gives structure to people's lives.
- 11:25Speaker 1: And historically it would be the case that a man
- 11:29Speaker 1: might be able to follow his father and his grandfather
- 11:31Speaker 1: into a trade and it would be a trade where
- 11:35Speaker 1: the pay was good, the benefits were good. There was
- 11:39Speaker 1: on the job training, if you work hard, you could
- 11:42Speaker 1: move up, You could have a middle class life for
- 11:44Speaker 1: your family. Those sorts of jobs are gone. On the
- 11:48Speaker 1: religion side, the legacy churches, it's not that people are
- 11:51Speaker 1: are less likely to report a religion. But the legacy
- 11:55Speaker 1: churches the ones who mentioned Catholic Church or Protestant churches
- 11:58Speaker 1: have given way to more seeking churches, which are much
- 12:02Speaker 1: more individual oriented but provide less structure. And then marriages. Um,
- 12:09Speaker 1: if you look at the birth cohort of nineteen fifty,
- 12:12Speaker 1: two thirds of them were married by age thirty. If
- 12:16Speaker 1: you go then to the birth cohort of nineteen sixty only,
- 12:19Speaker 1: um no, I'm sorry, the ones born in nineteen fifty
- 12:24Speaker 1: two thirds of the ones born in nineteen sixty. Only
- 12:27Speaker 1: half of the cohort born in nineteen seventy is married
- 12:30Speaker 1: at age thirty. So like if you think of marriage, job,
- 12:34Speaker 1: religion is giving people structure in their lives, all of
- 12:37Speaker 1: those have have sort of collapsed. Um, and we think
- 12:42Speaker 1: that that leaves people vulnerable as well to despair and
- 12:47Speaker 1: so much of what you just said it sounds a
- 12:51Speaker 1: lot like the economic side of what J. D. Vance
- 12:55Speaker 1: talks about in his personal story that he shares in
- 12:59Speaker 1: Hillbilly LG. Obviously, he his book has gotten pretty wide play,
- 13:04Speaker 1: been widely recognized. I'm curious if you've had a chance
- 13:07Speaker 1: to read the book or uh meet Mr Vance or
- 13:12Speaker 1: talk with him what you think of his story and
- 13:14Speaker 1: how that connects with the research that you've been doing.
- 13:18Speaker 1: I think it. I think it connects quite strongly. And
- 13:21Speaker 1: I I read with a lot of interest that he's
- 13:25Speaker 1: moving back to Columbus, Ohio and wants to actually put
- 13:32Speaker 1: his body and his family um in the sort of
- 13:37Speaker 1: where the heart of the problem is. I think that's
- 13:40Speaker 1: that's really noble, and that's really brave, um, because we
- 13:45Speaker 1: currently don't know how this is going to end. I
- 13:49Speaker 1: don't have for you, aside from turn off that tap
- 13:53Speaker 1: for strong opioids for chronic pain, you know, I don't
- 13:58Speaker 1: have like checklist of things that if we do this,
- 14:03Speaker 1: we can actually turn this problem around. And it's essential
- 14:08Speaker 1: that we do that. And I think g. D. Van's
- 14:12Speaker 1: being willing to put himself in the line and say,
- 14:16Speaker 1: let me see what I can do is a terrific thing,
- 14:21Speaker 1: and I would encourage more people to do that. Aside
- 14:26Speaker 1: from being a great read, one of the reasons j
- 14:29Speaker 1: D's book got such buzz was people were trying to
- 14:33Speaker 1: explain the economic roots of Donald Trump's support in states
- 14:38Speaker 1: not normally associated with going Republican at the presidential level. So,
- 14:44Speaker 1: and Paul Krugman would put this rather bluntly, so I
- 14:48Speaker 1: guess I'll just paraphrase him. And he said this publicly.
- 14:52Speaker 1: Why then, if a social safety net is so important
- 14:57Speaker 1: and unions are so important, why did these people then
- 15:01Speaker 1: vote against their own economic self interest. I think that
- 15:05Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the
- 15:08Speaker 1: right recognized that slowly working class America was collapsing and
- 15:16Speaker 1: that no one in Washington was representing their interests. So
- 15:21Speaker 1: I think that both the Bernie Sanders phenomenon and the
- 15:25Speaker 1: Trump phenomenon are about people pulling a lever to say,
- 15:31Speaker 1: we're not being heard, We're not being recognized. Um are
- 15:36Speaker 1: our wages have been falling, We're not seeing a ladder
- 15:41Speaker 1: up for our children, and we this is what this
- 15:45Speaker 1: is the way in which we think we can um
- 15:49Speaker 1: let people in Washington know that this is not working
- 15:53Speaker 1: for us. Well, they both certainly identified an issue, though
- 15:56Speaker 1: their prescriptions were quite different, but they were both out
- 16:00Speaker 1: to protect the working class. I think. Yet there was
- 16:03Speaker 1: also a platform that specifically said repeal and replace again.
- 16:10Speaker 1: Why would these people vote, as Krugman asks, to lose
- 16:15Speaker 1: a health insurance? Why would they do that? I think
- 16:17Speaker 1: it's the same reason why just having a social safety
- 16:21Speaker 1: net in the US that resembled that in Western Europe
- 16:24Speaker 1: may not work here. Um, the US is a country
- 16:31Speaker 1: I think where there's a large number of people who
- 16:34Speaker 1: believe that it's up to me to take care of
- 16:38Speaker 1: my family and it's up to my neighbor to do
- 16:41Speaker 1: the same for his, and that we don't want to
- 16:45Speaker 1: hand out. I mean, we have a just we have
- 16:49Speaker 1: a fishing guide in Montana where we go every summer
- 16:52Speaker 1: who is a veteran who fought in the Iraq the
- 16:56Speaker 1: Second Iraq War, and um, he needs medical care, but
- 17:00Speaker 1: he won't go to the VA hospital. And we asked whine.
- 17:04Speaker 1: He said, well, around here, we don't take hand doubts
- 17:08Speaker 1: and even and I was just a gas And I
- 17:10Speaker 1: mean we said, even though you fought for this country
- 17:14Speaker 1: and these are benefits that you deserve, and said down,
- 17:17Speaker 1: we don't take charity. So I think there's actually, um
- 17:22Speaker 1: a lot of resistance about giving up the you know,
- 17:27Speaker 1: individual sense of of self and purpose uh to a collective.
- 17:34Speaker 1: And I think that that is a block we're going
- 17:38Speaker 1: to come up against over and over. It really is
- 17:41Speaker 1: a hallmark of how a large number of Americans think
- 17:45Speaker 1: and behave so on the election issue, have you or
- 17:50Speaker 1: or are you going to cross reference some of your
- 17:54Speaker 1: geographic results with the vote count in to see if
- 17:59Speaker 1: the death rates correlate in any way with voting for
- 18:04Speaker 1: Trump por Clinton. I have to say, the day after
- 18:07Speaker 1: the election, I pulled down the county level um votes
- 18:13Speaker 1: for Clinton versus Trump, and they correlate extremely strongly. Point
- 18:20Speaker 1: for two. If that means anything to with mortality rates
- 18:25Speaker 1: of whites in middle age, one being the perfect correlation,
- 18:30Speaker 1: one being the perfect correlation, but point forward to being
- 18:33Speaker 1: very strong in any thing that looks in a cross section.
- 18:38Speaker 1: But a lot of people have correlated Trump votes with
- 18:42Speaker 1: things that are also related, you know, uh, the extent
- 18:46Speaker 1: to which manufacturing jobs are lost, for example, and I
- 18:52Speaker 1: think they're that's all of a piece. One of the
- 18:56Speaker 1: disturbing things we're finding is that this is a problem
- 18:59Speaker 1: that it's getting worse with every successive birth cohort. So
- 19:04Speaker 1: it's so the people born in nine eighty are having
- 19:07Speaker 1: a harder time than people born in nineteen seventy, who
- 19:10Speaker 1: are having a harder time than people born in nineteen sixty.
- 19:13Speaker 1: So it's not just the baby boomers moving through and
- 19:17Speaker 1: that everything's going to be fine. At the tail end
- 19:20Speaker 1: of that, it's it's way into gen X now as well,
- 19:24Speaker 1: and it doesn't show any signs of slowing down. The
- 19:28Speaker 1: phrase you use in your paper is cumulative disadvantage. These
- 19:32Speaker 1: are things that add up over the course of a
- 19:34Speaker 1: person's life, not getting a bachelor's degree, not getting a
- 19:38Speaker 1: good job, not getting married, and so on, until they
- 19:43Speaker 1: end in deaths of despair, as you call it. Is
- 19:47Speaker 1: the bottom line here that the US economy has been
- 19:51Speaker 1: changing dramatically, shifting away more and more from manufacturing to
- 19:56Speaker 1: a services oriented economy and to terms of education and skills.
- 20:02Speaker 1: That a certain cohort that just happens to be many
- 20:06Speaker 1: white working class Americans is not keeping up with these changes.
- 20:11Speaker 1: It's the data are entirely consistent with that story. So
- 20:16Speaker 1: we want to pull that apart further and see the
- 20:19Speaker 1: extent to which we can quantify that. But yes, i
- 20:23Speaker 1: the data. That's what the data seem to suggest. And
- 20:26Speaker 1: one of the things we've also found is that what
- 20:30Speaker 1: we call return to experience has fallen in the labor market.
- 20:34Speaker 1: That generally, the older you get, the more experience you have,
- 20:39Speaker 1: the more efficient you are your job, the higher your
- 20:43Speaker 1: wages become. And we're not seeing that same return to
- 20:47Speaker 1: experience for younger and younger birth cohorts. And I think
- 20:51Speaker 1: if you go to a service economy to a gig
- 20:54Speaker 1: economy where there's not that much experience necessary for some
- 20:58Speaker 1: of these jobs, UM, people don't see themselves in ten
- 21:02Speaker 1: years time having moved up the ladder. And that is
- 21:07Speaker 1: I think an incredibly serious problem. What what we do
- 21:11Speaker 1: about education. Not everybody wants to go to college, not everybody,
- 21:15Speaker 1: um has the wherewithal to go to college. But we've
- 21:19Speaker 1: got to change our education system in some way personal opinion, UM,
- 21:24Speaker 1: so that um we provide the skills for people that
- 21:29Speaker 1: that they'll be able to use in the twenty one
- 21:31Speaker 1: century economy. And I think the schools currently just aren't
- 21:37Speaker 1: keeping up with the changes that are necessary, you know,
- 21:40Speaker 1: and over the centuries, as you know, economic cycles rise
- 21:45Speaker 1: and full. If you take these manufacturing areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
- 21:51Speaker 1: three or four hundred years ago, it was all agriculture,
- 21:55Speaker 1: and before that land was owned by the indigenous inhabitants
- 21:59Speaker 1: of this continent. And similarly, when the Industrial Revolution came
- 22:03Speaker 1: to northeastern England. The cotton mill and the spinning wheel
- 22:07Speaker 1: was replaced Shore Luod. It's busted up a few workshops
- 22:11Speaker 1: in Manchester and Liverpool, but those cities rose again on steel, shipbuilding,
- 22:18Speaker 1: pop music. Why should we be so head up, wound
- 22:23Speaker 1: up and concerned about this group, this slice of industry,
- 22:28Speaker 1: in this portion of the country. I would say we
- 22:31Speaker 1: should be concerned because these people are dying in middle
- 22:34Speaker 1: ages where they have no business dying. Their despair is
- 22:38Speaker 1: actually palpable that at any given age, year on year
- 22:44Speaker 1: they report more mental distress, they report um, you know,
- 22:49Speaker 1: poor psychological health, and we I think if we want
- 22:57Speaker 1: to be a country, one country, we're going to have
- 23:02Speaker 1: to find a way to weave ourselves back together again.
- 23:06Speaker 1: And it's a depressing issue, but it's one that is
- 23:10Speaker 1: not going to be going away anytime soon and one
- 23:14Speaker 1: that we will surely be watching for years and generations
- 23:18Speaker 1: to come. Thank you so much for taking the time
- 23:20Speaker 1: again to be on benchmark today. Thank you so Dan.
- 23:31Speaker 1: Is this ever going to change? Is this issue? Is
- 23:34Speaker 1: there anything that you think can be done to actually
- 23:37Speaker 1: reverse this incredible increase in the death rate among white
- 23:42Speaker 1: working class Americans. The forces at work almost seem as
- 23:46Speaker 1: profound as the statistics that Anne cited. I try to
- 23:51Speaker 1: get her to talk a little bit about this issue.
- 23:54Speaker 1: She rised at the start where it might end, and
- 23:58Speaker 1: there was one thing she said just to the closing
- 24:00Speaker 1: there that stoffled me, and we should have it back
- 24:03Speaker 1: on to talk about this said, if we want to
- 24:05Speaker 1: remain one country. Did you notice that it now that
- 24:10Speaker 1: you're pointing at again, it is quite a profound statement. Yes,
- 24:14Speaker 1: implication being that this doesn't end will if you have
- 24:19Speaker 1: the death rate cleave off so so prominently from the
- 24:24Speaker 1: rest of the country. This is obviously more than just
- 24:27Speaker 1: an economic issue for our statistics. This is this is
- 24:31Speaker 1: life and death, and it could very well be a
- 24:35Speaker 1: change in the republic that makes news in more ways
- 24:39Speaker 1: beyond these statistics. Benchmark will be back next week and
- 24:43Speaker 1: until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal,
- 24:45Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot Com, our Bloomberg app, as well as on iTunes,
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- 24:54Speaker 1: While you're there, take a minute to rate and review
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- 24:59Speaker 1: us know what thought of the show. You can follow
- 25:01Speaker 1: me on Twitter at at scott Landman Dan. You are
- 25:05Speaker 1: at at Moss Underscore. Echo Benchmark is produced by Sarah Patterson.
- 25:10Speaker 1: The head of podcast is Alec McCabe. Thanks for listening,
- 25:14Speaker 1: we'll see you next time.