ECONOMISTS with a social conscience — or just a sliver of that precious human attribute — view the small rice farmers bludgeoned by the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL) from the same humanitarian lens as the two prominent American economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University, who wrote Deaths of Despair and the Failure of Capitalism. White working-class Americans (non-Hispanics), Case-Deaton found in their landmark study, have been dying from suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related illnesses due to long economic stagnation and the loss of decent jobs.

Wages have flattened, temporary contracting supplanted high-paying jobs in industry and manufacturing, gig work that can’t pay for health insurance became the norm, conditions that shattered the long-held idea of economic stability. Case-Deaton called these deaths in hollowed-out areas of America “deaths of despair.”

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