Middle Aged White American Experience Increased Death Rates

They’re dying, falling by the tens of thousands per year to self-inflicted wounds of drug and alcohol abuse or straightforward suicide.

But if the problem is social liberalism and the welfare state, progressives object, then why is the working class death rate only rising starkly in the United States? Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s. It’s also the segment of the white population with the worst prospects of finding new jobs at comparable wages after their old ones disappear, the group at greatest risk of ending up living in their cars and living off of food banks. “No other rich country saw a similar turnaround”. The divorce rate among those over age 50 has doubled – to one out of every four people at a time when divorce rates for other age groups have stabilized or dropped.

Something very troubling and very unique is happening to American working-class whites.

Moreover, the uptick in deaths doesn’t appear in any other industrialized Western nation. Only in America, and only among the white working class. If the mortality rate for whites between 45-54 before 1998 had continued its declining path, half a million deaths would have been avoided.

Since then, the statistician Andrew Gelman has pointed out that it’s probably more accurate to say that the death rate for white Americans has flattened since 1999. Including 54,000 in 2013. By looking at data from the CDC, researchers were able to evaluate mortality rates per 100,000 individuals, and compare this between ethnic groups.

Noting that religious practice has fallen faster recently among less-educated whites than among less-educated blacks and Hispanics, their paper argues that white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility. Between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of white mothers who were single rose from 18 percent to 30 percent for those with no college degree, but only from 6 percent to 9 percent for college graduates.

White Americans between the ages of 44 and 64 are in the middle of a deadly “epidemic” that researchers from Princeton University blame on drugs, alcohol, suicide and liver disease, including cirrhosis.

Deaton and Anne Case, both Princeton economists, received global media attention for the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Commenting on The Dallas Morning News, “S” wrote, “It is due to institutionalized racism against Whites”.

If my version of the story sounds a bit unfamiliar, though, don’t be surprised.

But the reason only middle-aged whites had a rise in their mortality rates, combined with risky trends marked along educational and racial lines, remains unclear. Case’s studies revealed middle-aged people reported more pain in recent years than in the past.

But that’s not exactly right, either. Case said she was studying morbidity in middle age, because more research has been done with elders and young people. In other words, the rise in mortality was not “primarily” among working-class white – it was only among working-class whites. But presenting the change that way, rather than isolating it within the group where it actually occurred, makes it harder to look for the cause. The increase looks like it has been going on since the late 1990s. “Substance abuse and alcoholism are taking their toll in a way people haven’t acknowledged”, he said.

A few of that shock is because the drivers of death are not the usual suspects – cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The decline of the white working class has been demographic as well. In addition, economic insecurity and wage stagnation have been an even bigger problem for blacks and Hispanics, and yet those groups are seeing their mortality fall. Also, declines in mental health, ability to cope with depression or stress and health in general may have caused the increase in mortality rate. “This heightens the existential pain of the already harsh economic realities of our globalized economy, which can be very punitive to the poorly educated”. The culprits, Reno wrote, are both “large-scale trends in our post-industrial society” as well as “a sustained and ongoing ideological assault on the basic norms for family and community”.

Breakdown of family support networks. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” – a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you.