‘Deaths of despair’ claiming subset of middle-age whites

WASHINGTON — A sobering portrait of less-educated middle-age white Americans emerged Thursday with new research showing them dying disproportionately from what one expert calls “deaths of despair” — suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol-related diseases.

The paper by two Princeton University economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, concludes that the trend is driven by the loss of steady middle-income jobs for those with a high school diploma or less. The economists argue that dwindling job opportunities have triggered broader problems for this group. They are more likely than their college-educated counterparts to be unemployed, unmarried or suffering from poor health.

“This is a story of the collapse of the white working class,” Mr. Deaton said. “The labor market has very much turned against them.”

Those dynamics helped fuel the rise of President Donald Trump, who won widespread support among whites with only a high school diploma. Yet Mr. Deaton said his policies are unlikely to reverse these trends, particularly the health care legislation now before the House that Mr. Trump is championing. That bill would lead to higher premiums for older Americans, the Congressional Budget Office has found.

“The policies that you see seem almost perfectly designed to hurt the very people who voted for him,” Mr. Deaton said.

Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton’s paper, issued by the Brookings Institution, follows up on research they released in 2015 that first documented a sharp increase in mortality among middle-aged whites.

Since 1999, white men and women ages 45 through 54 have endured a sharp increase in “deaths of despair,” Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton found in their earlier work. These include suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths such as liver failure.

In the paper released Thursday, Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton draw a clearer relationship between rising death rates and changes in the job market since the 1970s. They find that men without college degrees are less likely to receive rising incomes over time, a trend “consistent with men moving to lower and lower skilled jobs.”

Other research has found that Americans with only high school diplomas are less likely to get married or purchase a home and more likely to get divorced if they do marry.

“It’s not just their careers that have gone down the tubes, but their marriage prospects, their ability to raise children,” said Mr. Deaton, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2015 for his longstanding work on solutions to poverty. “That’s the kind of thing that can lead people to despair.”

The issues identified by Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton are likely contributing to a slight reversal in a decadeslong trend of improving life-expectancy data. It’s not entirely clear why these trends have affected whites much more than they have African-Americans or Hispanics, whose death rates are improving.

Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton note that many Hispanics are “markedly better off” than parents or grandparents who were born abroad, enabling a greater sense of optimism. African-Americans, they add, may have become more resilient to economic challenges given their long-standing disadvantages in the job market.