"White privilege" is such a commonly accepted pillar of American
society that it's become material for comics. As Chris Rock tells his
audience in the following clip, "There ain't a white man in this room
who would change places with me. And I'm rich!"
That's what the life expectancy numbers seem to indicate. Check out the
charts that appeared in today's Wall Street Journal:
Death
Rates Rise for Wide Swath of White Adults, Study Finds
Increases in 'deaths of despair' -- from drugs, alcohol-related liver
diseases and suicide.
In 2015, two Princeton University economists published a landmark paper
showing that mortality was rising for white middle-aged Americans after
decades of decline, a startling development for an economically advanced
nation. Now a new analysis from the same pair, released Thursday by the
Brookings Institution, paints an even bleaker picture of the nation's
largest-population group.
Mortality has been rising since the turn of this century for an even
broader swath of white adults, starting at age 25, the researchers found,
driven by troubles in a hard-hit working class. Death rates for white
non-Hispanics with a high-school education or less now exceed those of blacks
overall, the pair said -- and they're 30% higher for whites age 50 to 54 than
for blacks overall of that age.
A Rising Toll
New research shows the increasing mortality rate among white Americans
spans age groups and is most acute among the less-educated.
White deaths are rising...
Mortality rate by race, ages 50-54
...among all age groups of less-educated whites...
Mortality rate for whites with high school education or less, by age
...in contrast to elsewhere...
Mortality rate for all causes, ages 45-54
...due in part to increases in 'deaths of despair.'
Mortality rate due to alcohol, drugs and suicide, ages 50-54
Mortality rate=deaths per 100,000
Blacks have long had a much higher death rate than whites, but that rate
has dropped steeply since the beginning of this century, while the rate for
whites has crept up.
Driving the uptick are increases in "deaths of despair" -- from
drugs, alcohol-related liver diseases and suicide, as well as a slowdown in
progress against death in middle age from heart disease and cancer, the
nation's biggest killers, wrote Anne Case and Nobel Prize-winning economist
Angus Deaton, her husband. The pair examined more than 15 data sets,
including government health statistics, death certificates and various
economic indicators.
The analysis paints a portrait of a gradual "collapse of the white,
high-school-educated working class after its heyday in the early 1970s,"
whose health, mental well-being, and attachment to the labor force have
become successively worse for people born after 1945, they said.
The opioid epidemic has only heightened a trend that was already under way
before those drugs hit the market, they said.
By contrast, Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton noted, the mortality rate has
continued to decline this century for whites with a college degree, albeit
more slowly than before.
"This doesn't seem to be about current income," Ms. Case said in
a call with reporters. "It seems to be about accumulating despair."
The rising mortality of working-class white adults appears to be rooted
both in worse job opportunities and increasing social dysfunction, following
generations of relatively stable lives that involved job advancement and an
expectation of living better than one's parents, the researchers said.
Wages aren't rising with age now as much as they once did for
high-school-educated white men, Ms. Case said, suggesting that the composition
of jobs available to them has changed and that there is less upward mobility.
"The company man job has gone away for working-class people," Mr.
Deaton said.
Those changes have come along with trends such as a decline in marriage,
more temporary relationships and children out of wedlock, and a rise in
social isolation that have made life less stable, they said. Taken together,
these changes in life may be leading to physical and mental-health problems,
they said, calling their hypothesis "preliminary but plausible"
with more research needed on several fronts.
The work deepens a growing body of academic and government research into
the possible causes of rising mortality rates among whites, whose ills among
the working class are reshaping the nation's social, political and economic
landscape. Non-Hispanic whites make up 62% of the U.S. population, and their
rising mortality rates helped to push overall U.S. life expectancy down
slightly in 2015, to 78.8 years.
"For many Americans, America is starting to fail as a country,"
said James Smith, chair in labor markets and demographic research at the Rand
Corp., who wasn't involved in the paper and said he was struck that mortality
rates are rising for young working-class adults. "The bad things that
are going on in America do not appear to be going on in Western European
countries, and that's a big deal."
The phenomenon is occurring all across the country, both in urban and
rural areas, Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton wrote. And the ills are so deep and
complex that it could take many years and many changes in policy to reverse.
"As these people move into old age, they're going to be sick, and
that has disastrous consequences for Medicare and Social Security
policy," Mr. Deaton said.
Perhaps "former privilege" is more spiritually destabilizing
than "no privilege ever." In any event, it's not getting better.
Debt -- the main culprit in this story -- continues to accumulate everywhere,
while automation increasingly claims jobs that used to pave the way to the
middle class.
And this is before the next financial crisis decimates huge swaths of auto
manufacturing, home building and retailing. Millions of Americans will
experience that Hemingway quote -- "He went bankrupt slowly at first,
then all at once" -- first-hand.
