NYT: Death Rate Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans

This is profoundly depressing. Many responses to the article are heart-breaking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html?_r=0

DottyParker said:
This is profoundly depressing. Many responses to the article are heart-breaking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html?_r=0

yes. many of the comments seem to be from intelligent, educated people who have thought the issue out calmly and rationally and then responded with pretty cold callousness. it's the "let 'em crash" mentality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn0WdJx-Wkw

I'd like to see the Republican candidates discuss this article

What struck me is that the only equivalent broad based national group decline in the records was in post communist Russian men, when so many drank themselves to death. Sad and disturbing

Could there be any relation to the rise in popularity of Crystal Meth?

sprout said:
Could there be any relation to the rise in popularity of Crystal Meth?

I'd say they're both symptoms of the same problem.

The comments, particularly those in "Readers Picks", give some vivid views of the despair and hopelessness that is growing so ominously for so many people. As I read this, I thought of the opening lines of, "A tale of Two Cities"; "It was the best of times - It was the worst of times."

Between the slow death of unions, the rise of technology, offshoring and globalization, and "those people" (in their minds, not mine) taking many of the jobs that high-school educated white men used to work in, this is no surprise. Very sad.

kthnry said:
I'd like to see the Republican candidates discuss this article

That would be great.

One of the very few good ideas that I've heard from the Republicans is that employers should have to prove that no qualified American worker is available before issuing an H1b visa.

sprout said:
Could there be any relation to the rise in popularity of Crystal Meth?

I think the underlying issue is the dead-end nature of having only a high-school (or less) education in the U.S.. It's a recipe for dead-end jobs and life-long poverty (or near-poverty). The overall lack of opportunity for under-educated adults in the U.S. was not the norm in the fairly recent past.

It certainly seems that substance use is a factor, but I think crystal meth is just one substance and just one of a host of unhealthy behaviors (alcohol, smoking, obesity, etc. etc.).

Anyway, I agree this is a sad and scary report.

I read this with a heavy heart after recently losing two close family members to premature death due to drugs, alcoholism, and suicide. One was fifty and college-educated; the other was 58. Both were under severe financial distress. Something is very wrong in America today.

Many people who have college educations are also finding it very difficult to maintain strong careers. And others, who have had very successful careers, are losing jobs and having great difficulty finding new ones. It's a very bleak existence when you try your hardest, seem to do everything right, and still can't support yourself well and look forward to a decent retirement.

^^ Yep.

It's the economy. It's the lack of jobs.

I also think it's the economy more than education, especially where we see an increase in suicides. The middle-class is under extraordinary pressures today. Easy access to opiates and alcohol plus a lack of stable, good-paying jobs is a recipe for tragedy on a grand scale.

Many Americans grew up secure in white male supremacy and the perks of that. That is changing.

The American Empire is over as well. If we manage the country half-way intelligently, we should always be great country, but the days where we were able to totally dominate the world are past with the rise of China, India and many other previously economically insignificant countries.

tjohn said:
Many Americans grew up secure in white male supremacy and the perks of that. That is changing.

The perks of white male supremacy aside, people are dying and dying needlessly. Suffering is not bound by race, age, or gender, while not all people grow up equally secure. Although I agree that the American Empire is over, I'm not sure you realize how insensitive your comment sounds given the context of the discussion.

It wasn't intended to be insensitive so much as an explanation.

I think in many ways, our country is following the trajectory of the former USSR where the empire collapsed following by a period of economic hardship followed by a Fascist resurgence. Of course, the Russian experience was far more traumatic, but I see parallels.

Brigit said:
I also think it's the economy more than education, especially where we see an increase in suicides. The middle-class is under extraordinary pressures today. Easy access to opiates and alcohol plus a lack of stable, good-paying jobs is a recipe for tragedy on a grand scale.

This is exactly the opposite of what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case's analysis shows. It's education more than the economy. The squeeze may be hard on the middle, but it's harder still on the poor.

They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

if they expanded the suicide exclusions in insurance policies it would lower the death rate by suicide. Sad but true.

The economy has dramatically worsened for the less-educated over the years. The time is long gone where a hard-working high school dropout or even high school grad could do well-enough.

Robert_Casotto said:
if they expanded the suicide exclusions in insurance policies it would lower the death rate by suicide. Sad but true.

Do you have statistics to back up that assertion?

Brigit said:

tjohn said:
Many Americans grew up secure in white male supremacy and the perks of that. That is changing.

The perks of white male supremacy aside, people are dying and dying needlessly.

"People" is the operative word. Nowhere in the article are men singled out. Evidently women are suffering and dying just as much as men.

tjohn said:
The economy has dramatically worsened for the less-educated over the years. The time is long gone where a hard-working high school dropout or even high school grad could do well-enough.

This.

Robert_Casotto said:
if they expanded the suicide exclusions in insurance policies it would lower the death rate by suicide. Sad but true.

Since there is a relationship with financial stress, I would guess that there are not many life insurance policies in this demographic.

Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/boomers-deaths-pnas/413971/

Adam_West said:

Brigit said:
I also think it's the economy more than education, especially where we see an increase in suicides. The middle-class is under extraordinary pressures today. Easy access to opiates and alcohol plus a lack of stable, good-paying jobs is a recipe for tragedy on a grand scale.

This is exactly the opposite of what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case's analysis shows. It's education more than the economy. The squeeze may be hard on the middle, but it's harder still on the poor.

They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

Of course it's harder on the poor. What's happening here is that once-formerly middle class folks are falling into poverty or near poverty. This is exactly what happened to my college-educated, fifty-year-old female cousin who recently ended her life. This is one study; it doesn't necessarily capture the entire picture or magnitude of the problem.

Income inequality, lack of education, lack of health care, lack of job stability and security across most income brackets, globalization & rapid technological change, easy access to drugs and alcohol all play a role. I'm afraid the deaths we're seeing are just the tip of the iceberg.

Brigit said:
Income inequality, lack of education, lack of health care, lack of job stability and security across most income brackets, globalization & rapid technological change, easy access to drugs and alcohol all play a role. I'm afraid the deaths we're seeing are just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe, maybe not. Digging a bit (just a bit, so usual caveats bred by laziness apply) it appears that adults with some college or a bachelors were either flat or slightly up in mortality.

Over the period covered a larger cohort of Americans generally either attended or complete college. So it appears that this is a shrinking cohort we are looking at here- 50 years ago, "white, no college" looked very different from how it looks today.

I'm not drawing any solid conclusion except to say, holding all else constant, this would be a cohort that would struggle more today than they did in decades past- we are more of a specialized economy now, and the job market looks favorably on education- even for good paying jobs that 30 years ago rarely required college- think cops. These would be people who are falling ever further behind and becoming less employable as the mix shifts but they stand still, while those who historically would have been in that cohort moved into the some college/college group.

Trying to not sound pejorative, but it remains true that those most impacted appear to be "those left".