Today I read the AP article “Oil Spill’s Psychological Toll Quietly Mounts.” It’s a powerful story of the emotional struggles people in the Gulf Coast are facing as they lose their jobs, look toward an uncertain future and feel helpless – a key component of depression.
Using the standard metric I often describe here, the Gallup-Healthways survey, I assume that well-being has plummeted in much of the Gulf Coast region, especially among those most directly affected such as the shrimpers. Yet a contradiction arises when looking at the national data, at least for May: it rose to its highest level ever, while gasoline prices very strongly affected well-being from January through August 2008 before Lehman fell. Still, the spill has become a dominant national news story for the past two weeks, even though it does not seem to impact people’s lives directly in much in the rest of the country.
I suspect that we are seeing that Americans value more than their own well-being, and much of the national outcry is rooted in empathy for the people of the Gulf Coast and, to some extent, concern over wildlife in the region. Those in the Gulf Coast live in one of the most economically depressed areas of the country and are still recovering from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita five years ago. They now face another disaster. It is hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for these people who have dealt with so much. Additionally, I believe some people feel strongly that the effect on wildlife in the region is an unacceptable tradeoff for energy production.
Because clear culprits can be identified, especially negligent BP, many Americans probably feel angry in addition to empathetic. Anger is a rare negative emotion that encourages confrontation, so it follows that Americans are very interested in how the government handles and punishes BP.
I do not want to rule out that some of the feelings are self-interested, but the initial Gallup-Healthways surveys do not suggest this is the case to a large degree. Some people may think the spill will lead to policies that will increase prices at the pump or hurt the broader economy. My boss thinks that because America has a vibrant summer beach culture, it concerns people to think that their beaches might be soiled with oil in the future. I can understand how this thinking could influence policy away from opening up new drilling areas near coastlines, but unless one’s beach is coated now with oil, I don’t know why this concern would reduce present well-being. It could be that Americans’ concern that Gulf residents can’t use their beaches increases the feelings of empathy, but I think this is secondary to the jobs and wildlife.
The strength of the emotions that Americans not directly impacted feel is likely a result of the relatively clear storyline of how the shrimpers are losing their jobs and the inability of people to appropriately gauge responses to the magnitude of the economic calamity. If many disparate factories are closing down in various parts of the country, it can be difficult to focus on a cause (China’s currency, cheap labor elsewhere, bad management, poor government policies?) and have deep emotions for a lot of widely separated groups no matter how many are affected. Certainly many fewer people (probably something like 100x fewer, 100,000 vs. 10 million) will become unemployed in the Gulf Coast as a result of the spill than became unemployed nationwide as a result of the financial and economic crisis. But using a variant of a quote misattributed to Stalin, “The unemployment of one man is a tragedy. Unemployment of a million is a statistic.”
