If Ben Franklin were living today, he might want to revise his maxim to say life's surest probabilities are violent death and joblessness.
His revision would be based on a study by University of Washington social demographers that indicates all forms of violent death -- homicide, accidental death and suicide -- are linked to joblessness and its detrimental effects on the formation and stability of families.
The study, which analyzed 1970 and 1990 census data and vital records for Chicago, attempted to determine if race or economic opportunity is the key predictor of violent death. The findings come down strongly on the side of jobs.
"Clearly, economic disadvantage is the cause of racial differences mortality, race is not an explanation; you might say it's about jobs, stupid. Jobs are so dominant," said Gunnar Almgren, an assistant professor of social work and lead author of the study published in the journal Social Forces.
"Our work suggests that an unemployed adult black male from the poor side of Chicago or Harlem in New York is more likely to survive the next few years in Bangladesh than he is in his own neighborhood," he added. "Infant mortality rates in Bangladesh are worse, but once you get beyond that, the death rates are frighteningly similar. If you survive infancy and early childhood you are better off almost anywhere in the world other than in your own American neighborhood if it is extremely economically distressed (one with a 25 percent or higher unemployment rate). We have to wonder what are we doing as a society."
The study also found that there is a growing racial disparity in life expectancy, and that this, too, was linked to levels of joblessness. Despite general rising life expectancy for blacks and whites in the past three decades, the life span for working-age black males in the most economically distressed areas of Chicago actually decreased by 1* years between 1970 and 1990. In 1990, the life expectancy of black males in high unemployment areas was more than four years less than for blacks citywide. Between 1970 and 1990 black women in economically distressed neighborhood were slightly more successful in the job market and showed a 3.1-year gain in life expectancy, but this was significantly less than increases by black women in non-poor areas and for women in general. "We could observe that the patterns of joblessness and violent death rates were similarly linked in both the black and white communities. It was statistically apparent that if you ask which does the most, race or jobs, race got washed out by the economic effects," he said. "Both black and non-black communities show generally similar responses to endemic joblessness in terms of mortality. Race is not an explanation for differences in violent death rates. It's about jobs. If you isolate any group from jobs it is going to have negative effects, and inner-city black community levels of joblessness are higher than for any other group," said Almgren. Almgren said the study also showed that the relationship between violent death and joblessness became stronger between 1970 and 1990 and that rising suicide rates for young black males appear related to declining economic opportunity. "Historically, being black used to mean you were less likely to commit suicide than whites, and suicide rates tended not to correlate with economic conditions," he explained. "But that seems to have changed in the past few decades, and the suicide rate for young black males in Chicago is almost the same as for young white males. "Because of unequal economic opportunities, the life expectancies of two 10-year-old Chicago boys, one black who lives in a severely economically distressed neighborhood and one non-black who lives in an average neighborhood, are markedly different. The black youngster is seven times more likely to be a homicide victim, has double the chance of dying by accident and has an almost equal chance of being a suicide victim." Almgren noted that Chicago and other older manufacturing cities in the United States were hit by huge losses in the manufacturing sectors in the 1970-1990 period. Other researchers have documented the loss of 326,000 blue-collar jobs in Chicago during that time.
The UW team decided to look at all forms of violent death, rather than just homicide rates, when it earlier found that accidental death rates correlate to joblessness. Almgren said it became apparent that accidents were an important factor and that "not having access to employment is bad for people."
Virtually the entire city of Chicago was included in the study. The UW researchers looked at all 75 community areas (defined by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1930s) existent in 1970. Two smaller areas near O'Hare Airport annexed after 1970 were not included. Each community area has approximately 38,000 residents and is the right size, not too big or too small, so scientists can capture social characteristics of the neighborhood, according to Almgren. This enabled the researchers to look at black and white neighborhoods and observe essentially the same variations in levels of joblessness and family disruption.
The researchers wanted to do a separate analysis of non-black Hispanics, a group that more than doubled in size to over half a million in Chicago between 1970 and 1990, in the study. However, disparities between ethnic and racial identifiers on vital records and census data precluded this.
Co-authors of the study are Avery Guest, UW professor of sociology; George Immerwahr, a visiting scholar in residence at the UW's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology; and Michael Spittel, a former UW undergraduate student who is now a graduate sociology student at the University of Wisconsin.
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For more information, contact Almgren at (206) 685-4077 or [email protected]
or Guest at (206) 543-2051 or [email protected]
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