March 24, 2017

Low income whites' death rate soars

Huffington Post - Dwindling jobs for white, poorly educated, middle-age Americans is not only destroying their livelihoods and marriages, but also their lives, two Princeton University economists argue.

The mortality rate for whites with no more than a high school degree was about 30 percent higher than for blacks in 2015, according to the report. That’s a huge increase from 1999, when the mortality rate for this group of whites was about 30 percent lower than for blacks.

“This is a story of the collapse of the white working class,” said Angus Deaton, who co-wrote the paper with Anne Case. “The labor market has very much turned against them,” he told The New York Times.

Case and Deaton first noted the increase in mortality among middle-aged whites with high school educations in 2015. Their new report found that the trend has not abated over the past two years, and there’s been no reduction in what they call “deaths of despair” - including those caused by suicide, drugs and alcohol.

The trend affects whites of both sexes. Education level is significant because people with a college degree report better health and greater happiness than those who never attended. And while the death rate for whites without a college degree is rising, the rate for whites who are college graduates has dropped,

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