What is Giving Compass?
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Giving Compass' Take:
• Carol Graham and Sergio Pinto unpack how labor force participation, mobility trends, place, and well-being are influencing optimism and desperation in America.
• The authors highlight the differences in optimism based on demographics including geographical location and race. How are these factors playing out in your area?
• Learn about removing barriers to women's labor force participation.
The past few years have exposed deep divisions in the United States. Many of these – in our politics, in our civic discourse, and in our vision of what America should be – are a result of a widening gap between those with opportunities and with hope for the future, and those who are falling behind. These divisions are evident in our high levels of income inequality and reduced levels of intergenerational mobility, in the gaps across the rich and poor on indicators ranging from educational outcomes to life expectancy to marriage rates, and, most sadly, in the trends in preventable premature deaths.
In this paper, we provide more detail on patterns in these trends across places and people, with a focus on the cohorts with the lowest levels of well-being – and who are most vulnerable to despair and its manifestations in premature mortality. Our previously identified patterns in differential levels of optimism and resilience (including to deaths of despair) across races, still hold – and indeed are attenuated - at the level of labor force participation, mobility, and place.
We find particularly high levels of misery among prime aged males out of the labor force. The differences across races, though, play out the same way, and white OLF males are a particularly troubled cohort compared to black and Hispanic prime aged males OLF; to other labor market groups – including prime aged females OLF; and even to prime aged males OLF in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. This pattern also plays out at the level of place, with places in the heartland with declining employment – and higher rates of deaths of despair - having a higher concentration of the population out of the labor force.
We looked at the role of intergenerational and geographic mobility. Our findings are more significant on the latter type of mobility. Still, we find that individuals that live in counties with lower levels of absolute and relative mobility tend to have worse well-being and health indicators, with one important exception. These same respondents are more likely than the average to be satisfied with life today and with their communities, although they are not optimistic about the future. These trends reflect a “happy peasant and frustrated achiever” pattern that we have found in developing economies, where respondents with higher levels of upward mobility have lower levels of life satisfaction today, but higher aspirations for their futures, while those with lower mobility are content today but have lower aspirations.
An important part of the mobility story hinges on peoples’ ability and willingness to move to where jobs are. We explored the well-being of individuals living in counties with a higher or lower percentage of respondents who still live in their parents’ census tract, and then with those who still live in their parents’ homes. The counties with more “stayers” are more likely to be in rural and suburban areas rather than urban ones, and to have less absolute and relative mobility.
Respondents in counties with a high percentage of those still in their parents’ census tract tend to be content today and satisfied with their communities, but they are not hopeful for the future and have poor health indicators. Respondents in those countries with a high percentage of respondents who are still living in their parents’ homes – who typically have very low levels of mobility and are often OLF – are the most miserable, displaying lower levels of well-being across most dimensions, as well as very poor objective health indicators. Those individuals who are in their parents’ census tract have not had much mobility – and certainly not locational mobility – but have done relatively well compared to those who are still with their parents.
These trends have already received significant scholarly attention. Yet we provide a different perspective by tracking the reported well-being and ill-being of individuals and places. We find large differences in these trends across education levels, races, and places. Desperation – and the associated trends in premature mortality – are concentrated among the less than college educated and are much higher among poor whites than poor minorities, who remain optimistic about their futures. The trends are also geographically dispersed, with racially and economically diverse urban and coastal places much more optimistic and with much lower incidences of premature mortality (on average). Both death and desperation are higher in the heartland and in particular in areas that were previously hubs for the manufacturing and mining jobs which have long since disappeared.