Demographic Shock: Rise in death rates for middle-aged, working class White Americans

Nobel Prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his Princeton colleague, Dr. Anne Case, have discovered a dramatic increase in mortality rates among middle-aged White Americans. The trend is primarily driven by individuals with no more than a high school education, who, as a group, have contributed to an increase of 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2014. While middle-aged Blacks still have higher mortality rates than their counterparts in the White population, the gap appears to be closing.

The causes of this increase are not conventional diseases that typically afflict middle-aged individuals, but instead include suicide, and substance abuse related diseases such as alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. Poorly educated middle-aged White Americans also report high levels of chronic pain and poor health in general, which have been posited as possible causes of high suicide rates and substance abuse.

See complete story in The New York Times