This story is unique to the US

The US, particularly middle-aged white Americans, is an outlier in the developed world when it comes to this mid-life mortality uptick.

"Mortality rates in comparable rich countries have continued their pre-millennial fall at the rates that used to characterize the US," Case and Deaton write. "In contrast to the US, mortality rates in Europe are falling for those with low levels of educational attainment, and are doing so more rapidly than mortality rates for those with higher levels of education."

http://www.cnbc.com

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

"The middle-aged whites with less than a bachelor's degree saw "progress stop in mortality from heart disease and cancer, and saw increases in chronic lower respiratory disease and deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide," the researchers write.

Why education is such an important health indicator is difficult to untangle, Case added. "But when you think about what happens when industries pull out of towns, the tax base implodes, schools [are] not well funded, and the death spiral continues."

In the past, people with low levels of education could get a job in a factory and work their way up the chain of command. "You could graduate high school, work at Bethlehem Steel, get more money every year as you get more experienced," Deaton said, "and turn yourself into one of the famed blue-collar aristocrats of the 1970s." Now, he added, "There's a feeling that life has gone, and remainders of that life are getting less and less for each generation."

To be clear, the study authors don't buy the idea that one's income relative to what one expected is influencing mortality. Rather, "It's the life you expected to have relative to your father or grandfather - it's just not there anymore," Deaton said."

mortality for middle-aged black people converged with mortality for middle-aged white people with low levels of education in the late 2000s (though the white population overall is still doing better than African Americans). Meanwhile, mortality rates among Hispanics continued to fall.

These other racial groups aren't necessarily doing any better economically than their white counterparts, which is part of the reason Case and Deaton don't accept a simple income explanation for the death uptick.

"It is possible that it is not the last 20 years that matters, but rather that the long-run stagnation in wages and in incomes has bred a sense of hopelessness," they write. "But ... even if we go back to the late 1960s, the ethnic and racial patterns of median family incomes are similar for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, and so can provide no basis for their sharply different mortality outcomes after 1998."

Instead, the researchers think the fact that the overall life prospects for white middle-aged people without a BA have declined over time - they are doing worse than their parents on both a personal and professional level, and probably worse than they expected - is nudging mortality downward. This regression is different from the story of progress in the African American community, for example. Here's Case and Deaton again:


The historian Carol Anderson argued in an interview in Politico (2016) that for whites "if you've always been privileged, equality begins to look like oppression," and contrasts the pessimism among whites with the "sense of hopefulness, that sense of what America could be, that has been driving black folks for centuries." That hopefulness is consistent with the much lower suicide rates among blacks, but beyond that, while suggestive, it is hard to confront such accounts with the data."




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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

"if you've always been privileged, equality begins to look like oppression,"

Someone tell Obie.

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“It is the heart of US policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism “ - Michael Parenti

Love that line!  So the stages for the plunge go:

1. Anger
2. Denial
3. Opioid addiction
4. Trump voter
5. ....

Edited: 03/23/2017 at 02:04 PM by Greensleeves

It might be funny, but if we can't figure out a way to fix it, America is fucked.
We will get even Trumpier yet.

Imagine millions of FKs, but without the fat inheritance...

5... could be real bad

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Edited: 03/23/2017 at 01:48 PM by WG

Could be real good.  The newer Americans aren't nearly as racist, respect women, and do not have the feelings of entitlement that the miserly dope Trump voter has. 

Real good after the bloody civil war. We might end up with the Coastal States of America and the Confederation of Inland Sovereign States.

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“It is the heart of US policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism “ - Michael Parenti

Like the Muslim immigrants? Not so sure about that.

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I :heart; Q