This is the Tom Harbin program.

Welcome back, Tom Harbin here with you, Lynn Paramore, is writing over at the Institute

for New Economic Thinking about economic despair and how it affects humans and societies.

She points out that in 2015, this is long before the pandemic, in 2015, life expectancy

in America dropped for the first time in 100 years.

It dropped again in 2016, life expectancy had dropped again in 2017, and during that same

period of time, life expectancy for people in the top 1%, increased 140% faster than

those in low-income groups, this makes us an absolute outlier among nations.

Meanwhile, sociologist Shannon Monett at Syracuse University was looking at which communities

were being ravaged by opioids, and what she found was that it had nothing to do with how

many drug representatives came to town, or how many pharmacies there were, or doctors there

were, it had to do with inequality.

Communities that were highly unequal, not poor, but highly unequal, poverty often went

along with it.

We're more likely to have horrible opioid addiction epidemics, and she says in communities

with more economic stability, a strong safety net, and better quality jobs, fewer people

were dying from opioids.

What does despair, and specifically economic despair, how has that changed history over

the centuries?

Professor Richard Wolff is with us, the economist, co-founder, democracy at work.info, author

of numerous books, is most recent, the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save

us from pandemics, or itself, R.D. Wolff with 2Fs.com as well, and Prof. Wolff with 2Fs is

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