What's killing middle-aged white Americans without a college degree?

[Undertoad]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business...espair/520473/

Two years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an alarming revelation: Middle-aged white Americans without a college degree were dying in greater numbers, even as people in other developed countries were living longer.

The husband-and-wife team argued, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that these white Americans are facing "deaths of despair" — suicide, overdoses from alcohol and drug, and alcohol-related liver disease.
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Now, in a new paper, the economists explore why this demographic is so unhealthy. They conclude it has something to do with a lifetime of eroding economic opportunities. This may seem like a circular argument, when put together with previous work: Middle-aged Americans aren’t working because they’re sick, and middle-aged Americans are sick because they’re not working. But Case and Deaton argue that it’s not just poor job opportunities that are affecting this demographic, but rather, that these economic misfortunes build up and bleed into other segments of people’s lives, like marriage and mental health. This drives them to alcoholism, drug abuse, and even suicide, they say, in a new paper released Thursday in advance of a conference, the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.

“As the labor market turns against them, and the kinds of jobs they find get worse and worse for people without a college degree, that affects them in other ways too,” Deaton told me.

What differentiates Case and Deaton’s paper is this idea that as people get older and their fates deviate more and more from those of their parents, they struggle to keep their lives together. The very act of doing worse than their parents’ generation—what Case and Deaton call “cumulative disadvantage”—is killing them.

I see this in many of my friends.



They say the European safety net is what prevents a similar result in Europe, which faces the same globalization issues. To me it's more about the trajectory. The landscape of opportunity we looked out on in our 20s, versus the landscape of crush we now look upon in our middle age. Drinking makes sense.