Yesterday David Blanchflower opened a program sponsored by the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth, “COVID and Mental Health in America.” His talk was followed by a panel of seven surgeons general all investigating the mental health of young people. We’re grateful for the quality of work David regularly produces with his various colleagues.
Each slide is worth a thousand words, but in his own words, “The decline in wellbeing of the young and especially young women is shocking —12% of 22 to 23-year-old women say every day of their lives is a bad mental health day.” He notes that the trend started in 2011, “looks on first go a uniquely American phenomenon,” and may be driven by the high U-3 unemployment rate among those 16 to 24 years old. The U-3 captures only those who are unemployed and actively looking for work, an oddity in a time when people are complaining about labor shortages, especially as there is such a thing as on-the-job training.
Nineteen percent of women in that age group have had long Covid—rates among young women are about twice that of young men. David references a paper he wrote with his frequent partner Alex Bryson that documents long COVID’s unequal hand. Not only are rates higher among women, they are higher among Whites than among Blacks and Asians, and vary significantly by region: in West Virginia, 18% of those responding to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey reported having had long COVID, as did only 11% of those in Hawaii.
Prior to COVID, Blanchflower and Bryson found despair peaked in middle-age, but as you can see on the graph we selected from the deck, that is no longer true. It now declines with age, and also with higher levels of education. Overall, 11% of males and 14% of females short a high-school diploma suffer from despair, as do 17% of males and 19% of females with no diploma under 30. That ladders down to 3.6% of males and 4.4% of females with a graduate degree, and 6.7% and 7.8% of males and females under thirty with advanced degrees.
It’s easy to feel numb these days. David Blanchflower has studied workers and would-be-workers’ blues for decades and from many angles: un- and under-employment, disparate rates of despair among demographic groups, and working woes across countries. We’re guessing that if he’s shocked, Alex Bryson is shocked too, as we all might be. If we’re concerned about our country’s future, this is the place to start.
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If David Blanchflower is Shocked…
Yesterday David Blanchflower opened a program sponsored by the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth, “COVID and Mental Health in America.” His talk was followed by a panel of seven surgeons general all investigating the mental health of young people. We’re grateful for the quality of work David regularly produces with his various colleagues.
Each slide is worth a thousand words, but in his own words, “The decline in wellbeing of the young and especially young women is shocking —12% of 22 to 23-year-old women say every day of their lives is a bad mental health day.” He notes that the trend started in 2011, “looks on first go a uniquely American phenomenon,” and may be driven by the high U-3 unemployment rate among those 16 to 24 years old. The U-3 captures only those who are unemployed and actively looking for work, an oddity in a time when people are complaining about labor shortages, especially as there is such a thing as on-the-job training.
Nineteen percent of women in that age group have had long Covid—rates among young women are about twice that of young men. David references a paper he wrote with his frequent partner Alex Bryson that documents long COVID’s unequal hand. Not only are rates higher among women, they are higher among Whites than among Blacks and Asians, and vary significantly by region: in West Virginia, 18% of those responding to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey reported having had long COVID, as did only 11% of those in Hawaii.
Prior to COVID, Blanchflower and Bryson found despair peaked in middle-age, but as you can see on the graph we selected from the deck, that is no longer true. It now declines with age, and also with higher levels of education. Overall, 11% of males and 14% of females short a high-school diploma suffer from despair, as do 17% of males and 19% of females with no diploma under 30. That ladders down to 3.6% of males and 4.4% of females with a graduate degree, and 6.7% and 7.8% of males and females under thirty with advanced degrees.
It’s easy to feel numb these days. David Blanchflower has studied workers and would-be-workers’ blues for decades and from many angles: un- and under-employment, disparate rates of despair among demographic groups, and working woes across countries. We’re guessing that if he’s shocked, Alex Bryson is shocked too, as we all might be. If we’re concerned about our country’s future, this is the place to start.