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The Grim New Statistic On White Working Class Mortality

March 27, 2022 Posted By News

Aaron Bandler,

A new paper authored by Princeton professors puts forward a statistic on white working class mortality that will completely shock you.

The paper, co-authored by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and published by the Brookings Institute, found that in 1999, whites in the 50 to 54 age range who didn’t have a high school degree had a 30 percent lower mortality rate than blacks in that same age group; in 2015, the mortality rate was 30 percent higher among whites than blacks in the same age group.

whiteworkingclass_small The Grim New Statistic On White Working Class Mortality News

Case and Deaton argue that the reasons for the sharp rise in mortality rate among the white working class include:

  • A trend away from marriage and toward less stable co-habitation partnerships.
  • A rise in alcoholism, suicides, and drug overdoses; what the authors call “deaths of despair.”
  • Economic hardship.

    According to the authors, the economic hardship aspect is the underlying reason for the rise in white working class mortality rates; they argue that these individuals have been crowded out of the labor market through automation and globalization. Case and Deaton also assert that economic growth is not the issue; it’s the disproportionate amount of wealth concentrated for top earners that is the problem. They call for strengthening the safety net.

    They also write that while the heroin and opioid epidemic are symptomatic of the issues causing the rise in mortality rates among the white working class, it is not the primary driver of it.

    “Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high school educated, working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline,” the authors write.

    While the authors seem to have thoroughly researched their data, their conclusions may be a little off the mark. It is not globalization and automation that are causing economic calamity; it’s the result of the heavy hand of the federal government, particularly with the burdensome costs it imposes with the onerous pages of regulations it issues every year.

    Additionally, research shows that marriage reduces the likelihood of alcohol and drug abuse for both children and adults; therefore, it can be conjectured that the decline in marriage takes away a stable support structure people can turn to if they have been crowded out of the labor market, causing the dark turn toward drugs and alcohol to ease the pain.

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  • DrArtaud

    I’m thinking that opioid and heroin deaths are higher than reported. Years ago, listening to the police radio, overdoses were extremely uncommon. Recently, we’ve turned on the police radio, and in the course of 15 minutes, heard 6 different overdose cases dispatched on the radio. Last year, my wife and I heard a noise that caught our attention, so she opened the front door, trying to find the cause. Incredibly, the street was lined in rescue vehicles. Two doors away, just as our mail-lady was delivering to the affected house, a fire truck, used as a first responder, hastily pulled up, a fireman jumped from the cab and ran up the steps, syringe of NARCAN in hand. The victim was a woman. As we watched, the police pulled up, running from their car to the home, then an ambulance, and as they tried to save her, they called a second ambulance that had been dispatched, one with advanced life support available, to tell them to hurry up. We could hear the 2nd ambulance wending its way through the city streets. They transported her, the ambulance consulting with the doctor at the hospital. Despite our best wishes for the outcome, she passed away at the hospital.

    I suspect many of these cases aren’t being properly categorized, that there are more opioid and heroin deaths than we realize, and always, of course, alcohol, with the immediate effect of causing fatalities in accidents and long term effect of diminished health. But there is despair when people aren’t working fully, not providing for their family’s needs like they believe they should. Despite training in opticianry, pharmacy technician, and electronics, I ended up in the mill, making more per hour than possible in opticianry and pharmacy and likely more than I’d made in electronics. But the workplace is dangerous, chemical exposures and physical hazards. Though the hourly rate seemed largely more than the work mostly deserved, it was scant compensation for things we were exposed to that really should not have existed.

    Interesting article, I had no idea about the change in statistics for that age group.