Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair

New Hampshire was the highest earning state in 2016 and number 2 in opioid OD deaths.

Dear Angus Deaton with all due respect you might consider reassessing your deaths of despair theory. It never made much sense to me, there is in fact some evidence that people drink and drug more when they have more income and therefore access to booze and drugs, which is BTW a problem for my advocacy of legalization but I thin the positives would out weigh the negatives.

Related: Health Insurance Might not be Good for Everyone

Added 2018-01-08  see here

In the preferred estimates, changes in economic conditions account for less than one-tenth of the rise in drug and opioid-involved mortality rates. The contribution of economic factors is even less when accounting for plausible selection on unobservables, with even a small amount of remaining confounding factors being sufficient to entirely eliminate the relationship. 

Added 2022-10-19

Some people seem to miss that variance among people means that prosperity can lead some people to engage more in behaviors that people like Angus Deaton and me consider destructive. This is from Freakonomics post called Retirement Kills.

Josef ZWEIMULLER: I mean, actually, what we find in our study is that among blue-collar workers, we see that workers who retire earlier have higher mortality rates. And these effects are pretty large.

            ... 

Mo WANG: Working actually gives you a way to structure life and that’s very important. Usually, it’s interesting you see people travel right after they retire, but then after like one or two years, people just sit at home watching TV.

This relates to opioid deaths in that fentanyl has made opioids cheapar and more accessible, which is a wealth effect, and so we should expect more use among those who like opioids.

Also this tweet from Robin Hanson seems applicable:

I missed this when it out a year ago, but this article pointed me to this key result: Per capita US drug deaths have steadily doubled every decade 4 times in a row, R^2=0.99! Even as particular drug death rates far from steady. 

This graph from here https://takimag.com/article/white_privilege_vs_white_death_steve_sailer/ makes it seem like the trend started with cohorts born after 1945. Which suggest the trend has actually been going for ~55 years, which suggests it will continue for another ~3 decades, after which mortality will be ~8x higher!

The trend looks much more a result of growing prosperity than of Despair. Shout it form the house tops.