Job losses in the manufacturing industry have not only crushed overall employment levels, but have also boosted opioid use, according to a new study published Monday.
University of Chicago social scientists found that the decline of jobs in the sector during the 2000s could explain up to one-third of the decline in employment for working-age people since 2000. They also found that manufacturing job losses were associated with higher opioid overdose deaths.
The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research Monday morning but not yet reviewed by peers, is a point of evidence in favor of the contested idea that opioid addiction is tied to economic losses, and that overdoses could represent “deaths of despair.”
[Opioid crisis caused almost 1 million to be absent from workforce, cost $700 billion: Study]
The paper found that places particularly dependent on manufacturing in 2000 suffered disproportionate, long-lasting employment losses in the following years. Those include parts of Georgia, Indiana, western Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Communities in which the manufacturing base shrank saw lower employment rates for working-age women and particularly men, the authors found using Census data.
Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the drug-testing company Quest Diagnostics, they found that opioid use and overdoses went up in those communities.
In theory, job losses in any one sector should be replaced by job gains in other industries. But the paper suggested manufacturing losses may be different, and offered some evidence that low-skilled manufacturing workers aren’t able to quickly get the skills needed to find jobs elsewhere, and also don’t tend to move out of the area for jobs elsewhere.
The research is similar to studies that found that the “China shock” of low-cost imports from China hammered Rust Belt manufacturers in the 2000s and that many of the people who lost jobs never recovered.
Those are some of the places where President Trump beat expectations in the 2016 election and that he has sought to support with tariffs on some U.S. trading partners.
But Monday’s paper, written by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Mariel Schwartz, also contained hints that protectionism in trade with China wouldn’t help. The paper found that manufacturing job losses had terrible long-run effects regardless of whether they were tied to trade with China, which suggests that just limiting trade with China wouldn’t affect the underlying problems in the jobs market.
