Two Princeton economists startled other Americans — and themselves — when they uncovered a trend that had escaped the medical and scientific world: Between 1999 and 2013, white middle-aged men and women in the United States, especially those with only a high school education, began dying at a sharply increased rate, largely a result of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide. The health and financial implications are disturbing for the country, and for what the two economists called a “lost generation.”
The discovery was made by Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science this year, and his wife, Anne Case. In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said the finding nearly blew them off their chairs.
Death rates have continued to decline in every other age group and racial or ethnic group in the United States, and this particular group had shown no unusual problems in the preceding years. (Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than middle-aged whites but the gap is closing. Middle-aged Hispanics have a far lower mortality rate than whites.)
When the economists sliced and diced the data, they found that the mortality rate for all white Americans from 45 to 54 years, which fell by 2 percent a year between 1978 and 1998, began rising at an annual rate of 0.5 percent beginning in 1999. The toll was especially high for the less educated. Death rates rose by 22 percent for people with a high school education or less, while they continued to decline for those with a college education or better.
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