Attendance saves

 Attendance saves

There’s been a lot of coverage of the opioid epidemic, the plight of middle-age non-college-educated white people, and “deaths of despair” (i.e., suicides and deaths from drugs and alcohol) in the last couple of decades. But a new study suggests that the origin story lies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when attendance at religious services plummeted, especially among middle-age non-college-educated white people, and was followed by a sharp upturn in deaths of despair among this group.

Giles, T. et al., “Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion,” National Bureau of Economic Research (January 2023).

Selective enforcement

In 2017, one of the priorities of the new Trump administration was to crack down on high-tech work visas for foreigners. A political scientist obtained records of employer petitions for such visas by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to US Citizenship and Immigration Services and indeed found an increase in denial rates in 2017. However, the denial rates for such visas were lower for employers that had lobbied the administration on immigration.

Liao, S., “The Effect of Firm Lobbying on High-Skilled Visa Adjudicati