A week after it was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a paper by the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing that middle-aged white Americans are dying in much larger numbers than they used to is still the talk of the town. Indeed, the discussion is only beginning. Based on what we know so far, Case and Deaton have uncovered a story that epidemiologists, economists, journalists, and policymakers have largely missed.
To recap some of Case and Deaton’s findings, which were summarized in the Times and elsewhere: Between 1999 and 2013, among whites aged forty-five to fifty-four whose educational qualifications are limited to a high-school diploma or below, the number of deaths per hundred thousand people rose by 134.4. That represents a jump in the death rate of more than twenty per cent. Compared with a scenario in which the mortality rate for this group continued to decline at the rate it was falling prior to 1999, about half a million lives have been lost—many of them to drug and alcohol poisoning, suicides, and liver diseases often associated with drug and alcohol abuse.
[For more of this story, written by John Cassidy, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...aged-white-americans]
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