“Deaths of despair” can be reduced by increasing wages and tax credits for low-income Americans, according to new research from a team at the University of California at Berkeley.
Brian Benson of the Kern County coroner's office unloads the body of a 44-year-old white woman in Bakersfield, Calif., in 2016. The number of fatal overdoses had tripled and the number of suicides had doubled for white women since the turn of the century in the county.
Raising the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit by 10 percent each could prevent about 1,230 suicides annually, according to a working paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week. In 2017, Case and Deaton wrote that those rising death rates can be attributed to “drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related liver mortality — particularly among those with a high school degree or less.”To evaluate how policy choices could affect those deaths, the Berkeley team identified states that had raised their minimum wage or EITC between 1999 and 2015. They also included states whose wages were affected by federal minimum-wage increases.
The team found little change in drug overdoses, whether intentional or accidental, after the new policies took effect. This falls in line with the growing consensus that, unlike other deaths of despair, drug overdoses probably are linked to increased availability of addictive drugs.But the number of suicides that weren’t related to drugs dropped noticeably. Among adults without a college education, increasing the EITC by 10 percent appears to have decreased non-drug suicides by about 5.
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