As anyone familiar with the work of Robert Putnam or Charles Murray can tell you, things are not going very well for the white working class, and specifically for whites with a high school education or less.
Left behind economically, neglected politically and dismissed culturally, millions of men and women have slipped into a web of despair — alienation, self-loathing, social dysfunction, addiction and eventually early death.
A 2015 study by Sir Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton University found a shocking rise in death rates for middle-aged whites. Their new paper, called “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st Century,” explores the factors that have contributed to this phenomenon.
The researchers find that while midlife mortality rates for most demographics have fallen in recent years, they’ve been rising for two decades among non-Hispanic whites with a high school diploma or less. They report that this is because of the “deaths of despair”—addiction and suicide, as well as heart disease and cancer.
Many young non-college educated whites find that they cannot find decent work, and they lack the wherewithal to obtain the education necessary to find it. That puts them in a spiral of despair. Alcohol, drugs, unhealthy food and risky behavior dulls the pain for a while, but those things eventually compound their problems. By the time they reach middle age, many find that their lives haven’t turned out as they imagined they would. They’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, obese and unhealthy, and alienated from their families or without the ability to provide for them.
“The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015,” the authors find.
One interesting finding: The epidemic no longer seems to discriminate based on geography. The diseases of despair once mainly affected working class whites in the Southwest and Appalachia. But the phenomenon is countrywide now. The authors divided the country into more than 1,000 regions and found that the rate of “deaths of despair” in midlife for whites rose in nearly every part of the county.
The researchers also find that the rise of the midlife mortality “deaths of despair” is a uniquely American phenomenon, at least among rich countries.
Read their paper here.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
