Two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, have been analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources. What they have found is simply startling. These economists, who happen to be married to one another, found that unlike every other racial and ethnic group, and unlike every other age group, death rates are rising among middle-aged white Americans.
The New York Times recently featured this research, which concludes that rising annual death rates among middle aged whites is not being driven by big killers like diabetes and heart disease, but rather by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse, including alcoholism.
Between nineteen ninety and two thousand and fourteen, the mortality rate for whites forty-five to fifty-four years old with no more than a high school education increased by one hundred and thirty four deaths per one hundred thousand people.
Middle-aged African Americans still have a higher mortality rates than whites, but the gap is closing, and the mortality rate for middle aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle aged whites.
