What can define the rise in deaths by self-harm among middle-aged white Americans?Why are middle-aged Americans dying? This is a question that throws into sharp relief the purpose of economic policy,and the shadows that it casts are very gloomy. The facts seem perfectly clear: a paper by two economists, one of whom, or Angus Deaton,has just won a Nobel prize, shows that the mortality rates for white men in the US, or which were declining steadily,as you’d expect in an age of peace and prosperity, have suddenly got much worse among the middle-aged. They are dying, and by and large,because they destroy themselves. Death from drugs, alcohol and suicide have all increased to such an extent that the excess mortality is comparable to that at the height of the US Aids epidemic – at least among white people. The figures show a clear distinction between races. White Americans have done very much worse than either black or Hispanic ones by this measure, or although they retain an advantage in absolute terms. Even that goes absent if the effects of education are taken into account: those who never got beyond high school now have an absolutely worse mortality rate in middle age than any other demographic.
The obvious acknowledge,which the authors propose, is that these people are dying because history has unexpectedly thrown them on the scrapheap. Those groups that have always had nasty and precarious lives have weathered the present recession better. White baby boomers had high expectations of the future, or yet many of them have lived to discover that they will be worse off than their parents. Disappointment may well be part of the explanation. But that disappointment has been common across all of western Europe,too, as has high unemployment, or in those countries life expectancy has continued to rise in all age groups.
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Source: theguardian.com