Gabor Scheiring

Shocks Without Therapy: Deaths of Despair in Eastern Europe and the United States

Gabor Scheiring

Georgetown University Qatar

gs1098@georgetown.edu

Foreshadowing today’s epidemic of deaths of despair in the United States, an unprecedented mortality crisis swept Eastern Europe 30 years ago as the region transitioned to capitalism. In the first 15 years after the fall of Communism, Russia alone lost more than three times as many people as it did during World War I, with male life expectancy plummeting by 5.7 years from 1991 to 1994. Across Eastern Europe, this resulted in 7.3 million excess deaths in just a decade. This mortality crisis ranks as one of the most significant demographic disasters outside famine or war in recent history and offers revealing parallels to contemporary America. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, the U.S. already stood out among high-income countries for its stagnating life expectancy and soaring death rates among the lower-educated. Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case have pointed out that “it is no exaggeration to compare the long-standing misery of these Eastern Europeans with the wave of despair driving suicides, alcohol, and drug abuse among less-educated white Americans.” Both mortality crises can only be fully understood by considering the human dimension of ill health and the socio-economic roots of psychological suffering. Drawing on the largest data-gathering project on the postsocialist mortality crisis, this research presents new quantitative and qualitative evidence on the roles of deindustrialization, privatization, and welfare interventions in shaping the crisis. The central thesis argues that varying economic shocks and policy responses explain the intensity of psychosocial distress, loss of meaning, and erosion of community that fuel deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug use. The lecture will conclude with a transatlantic comparison of deaths of despair and their implications for political stability, focusing on the political repercussions of health crises in Hungary, Russia, and the United States.

BIOGRAPHY

Gábor Scheiring is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Georgetown University Qatar. He previously served as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University's Center for European Studies and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and Bocconi University. His research explores the political economy and lived experiences of contemporary economic transformations through quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods. He focuses on how economic shocks create precarity, leading to mental and physical suffering, and how these processes impact democratic stability. His book, The Retreat of Liberal Democracy (Palgrave, 2020), which won the BASEES 2021 Book Award, examines how working-class dislocation and elite co-optation foster illiberalism in Hungary. His work has been published in leading journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Lancet Global Health, the Annual Review of Sociology, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. As a member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010–2014), he advocated for a socially just transition to sustainability.