From the Times, an unexpected new finding by some doctors poring through our nation's health statistics:
Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds
Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.
That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.
The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.
The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.
I should add, from Table 1 in the study - that death rate fell very slightly for whites with some college but no degree (-3.3) and notably for those with at least a BA (-57).
Also:
Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.
By demographic group, the high school whites have a mortality rate of 735.8 per 100,000; some college is 287.8; and a BA or higher is 178.1. So working class whites are trailing blacks as a whole, which was not true in 1999 - the high school whites mortality rate rose from about 600 to 736 per 100,000 while the black rate fell from 797 to 592. But although we have some racial statistics, I don't see any male/female breakdown in the study. Naturally, I am left wondering whether that is because there was no difference in gender trends, or because such a finding might not advance any appropriate narrative [MORE: This study shows that life expectancy dropped even faster for poor white women than poor white men, so the War on Women lives.]. That said, "White Lives Matter (and may be less privileged than you think)" is transgressive enough.
The authors also note the grim prospects for Medicare, since this high-mortality group is part of the baby boom:
A serious concern is that those currently in midlife will age into Medicare in worse health than the currently elderly. This is not automatic; if the epidemic is brought under control, its survivors may have a healthy old age. However, addictions are hard to treat and pain is hard to control, so those currently in midlife may be a “lost generation” (36) whose future is less bright than those who preceded them.
LOTS OF IDEAS: A Princeton prof (and TAP founder) speculates as to the causes and political implications. Lots is good but let me argue with this:
To conservatives, the white midlife mortality reversal in the United States may initially seem to confirm Murray’s argument about moral decay caused by the welfare state. But that interpretation runs into an obvious objection: Similar trends are not evident in the European countries that have even more generous systems of social protection than the United States does.
Well, the obvious objection has its own obvious objection - Europe's paternalism preceded the US version so they may have succeeded in developing social norms that kept people on the dole out of bars prior to the 1999-2013 time frame studied here.
BONDING WITH PUTIN: The life expectancy article noted this, which is surely applicable to the latest mortality data:
The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors.
MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Obviously (but here I go anyway), the whole "angry working class whites" political theme gets additional resonance when we learn that this group is not only angry but suicidally depressed.
NOBODY ASKED, BUT: Here is Paul Krugman on immigration:
Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.
Check your calendar - on even numbered days Democrats clamor for more unskilled immigration, legal documented or otherwise. On odd-numbered days their chief concern is stagnant working class wages. But linking the two ideas? Never, you haters.
FWIW: Nick Kristof described his working class, high school friend who died recently at age 54:
Where’s the Empathy?
YAMHILL, Ore. — THE funeral for my high school buddy Kevin Green is Saturday, near this town where we both grew up.
The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.
Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin — obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps — as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?
That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy or living cushy lives. A poll released this month by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy Americans mostly agree that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
Mr. Kristof does not ruminate on whether an influx of unskilled labor devalued Kevin's unskilled labor because haters. No, rich people ignored Kevin and left him to die - vote Democrat!
The local glove factory and feed store closed, and other blue-collar employers cut back. Good union jobs became hard to find. For a while, Kevin had a low-paying nonunion job working for a construction company. After that company went under, he worked as shift manager making trailer homes. He fell in love and had twin boys that he doted on. But because he and his girlfriend struggled financially, they never married.
Then, about 15 years ago, Kevin hurt his back and was laid off. Soon afterward, his girlfriend moved out, took the kids and asked for child support. The loss of his girlfriend, kids and job was a huge blow.
“It knocked him to the dirt,” says his younger brother, Clayton, also a pal of mine. “It destroyed his self-esteem.”
Kevin’s weight ballooned to 350 pounds, and he developed diabetes and had a couple of heart attacks. He grew marijuana and self-medicated with it, Clayton says, and was arrested for drug offenses.
Here is a bit about Yamhill County from Wikipedia:
The medianincome for a household in the county is $44,111, and the median income for a family was $50,336. Males had a median income of $35,686 versus $25,254 for females. The per capita income for the county was $18,951. About 6.00% of families and 9.20% of the population were below the poverty line, including 10.10% of those under age 18 and 7.50% of those age 65 or over.
Economy
The major industries of the county are agriculture, forest products, manufacturing, and education. Yamhill County's economy is supported largely by its many unionized facilities such as Cascade Steel in McMinnville and White Birch Paper in Newberg. It boasts a thriving wine industry and is the home of Evergreen Aviation.
Yamhill County ranks seventh out of Oregon's thirty-six counties in annual market value of its agricultural production.[citation needed] This agricultural production includes wheat, barley, horticulture, and dairy farming, with 13,201 acres (53 km²) in 1997 planted in orchards. One-third of the county is covered with commercial timber, and the economic mainstay of the western part of the county is logging and timber products.
The county population has grown steadily since 1960, so it does not seem to be a forgotten backwater (for fans of "Justified", Harlan County KY has had a mostly falling population since the 60's.). The town has had a mostly rising population from one census to the next.