Department of Sociology and Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Demography. 2022 Apr 1;59(2):607-628. doi: 10.1215/00703370-9774819.
The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to "deaths of despair." Increasing automation-the use of industrial robots to perform tasks previously done by human workers-is one structural force driving the decline of manufacturing jobs and wages. In this study, we examine the impact of automation on age- and sex-specific mortality. Using exogenous variation in automation to support causal inference, we find that increases in automation over the period 1993-2007 led to substantive increases in all-cause mortality for both men and women aged 45-54. Disaggregating by cause, we find evidence that automation is associated with increases in drug overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and cardiovascular mortality, although patterns differ by age and sex. We further examine heterogeneity in effects by safety net program generosity, labor market policies, and the supply of prescription opioids.
制造业就业岗位的减少经常被认为是美国人口健康趋势恶化的一个关键原因，包括“绝望致死”导致的死亡率上升。自动化程度的提高——使用工业机器人来完成以前由人类工人完成的任务——是推动制造业就业岗位和工资下降的结构性力量之一。在这项研究中，我们研究了自动化对年龄和性别特定死亡率的影响。我们利用自动化的外生变化来支持因果推理，发现 1993 年至 2007 年间自动化程度的提高导致了 45 至 54 岁男性和女性的全因死亡率的实质性上升。通过死因细分，我们发现有证据表明自动化与药物过量死亡、自杀、他杀和心血管死亡率的增加有关，尽管模式因年龄和性别而异。我们进一步考察了安全网计划慷慨程度、劳动力市场政策和处方类阿片供应对影响的异质性。
