Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States

The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to ‘deaths of despair’. Increasing automation—the use of industrial robots to perform tasks previously done by human workers—is one major structural force driving the decline of manufacturing jobs and wages. In this study we examine the impact of automation on age-sex specific mortality. Using exogenous variation in automation to support causal inference, we find that increases in automation over the period 1993–2007 led to substantive increases in all-cause mortality for both men and women aged 45-54. Disaggregating by cause, we find evidence automation is associated with increases in drug overdose deaths, suicide, homicide and cardiovascular mortality although patterns differ across age-sex groups. We go on to examine heterogeneity in effects by safety net program generosity, labor market policies, and the supply of prescription opioids.

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply because states like New York or California benefited from having a high fraction of college-educated residents who enjoyed the largest health gains during the last several decades. Nor was higher dispersion in mortality caused entirely by the increasing importance of “deaths of despair,” or by rising spatial income inequality during the same period. Instead, over time, state-level mortality has become increasingly correlated with state-level income; in 1992, income explained only 3 percent of mortality inequality, but by 2016, state-level income explained 58 percent. These mortality patterns are consistent with the view that high-income states in 1992 were better able to enact public health strategies and adopt behaviors that, over the next quarter-century, resulted in pronounced relative declines in mortality. The substantial longevity gains in high-income states led to greater cross-state inequality in mortality.

Markets and communities: the social cost of the meritocracy

Critiques of the meritocracy have centered on its narrow definition and biased assessment of merit, its stigmatization of the unsuccessful, and excessive competition. This paper identifies a different mechanism that could have pernicious social and political consequences. Economic mobility sorts people based on certain ‘productive’ traits, separating them into classes, and thus alters social externalities. This sorting–separation–externalities mechanism can produce between-class polarization in social outcomes (e.g. alcoholism and drug abuse) and worsen aggregate outcomes over all classes, consistent with rising ‘deaths of despair’ in the United States (Case and Deaton, 2020, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press). When traits are endogenous, transition out of a caste-based society produces an initial burst of economic mobility which dissipates over time. Thus, a dynamic meritocratic society devolves into a static class-based society. I set out an alternative model called the ‘experimental society’, which is less susceptible to these problems.