“Something startling,” writes Gina Kolata for the New York Times, “is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries,” she continues, “death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” She’s referring to a study “by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case,” who suggest, admitting they lack sufficient evidence, that the cause may be related to the economic fortunes of whites with no more than a high school education, a group in which deaths due to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are concentrated, and whose inflation-adjusted incomes have dropped by nineteen percent (apparently, but this is unclear, since the 1990s).[1] A corresponding article in the Wall Street Journal tries to blame drug addiction instead by first emphasizing the uncertainty of the relationship between economic distress and the rising death rate. It then concludes, “prescription drug addictions may be causing economic challenges by depressing labor-force participation, rather than economic forces like deindustrialization causing prescription-drug addictions. But either way, an urgent health and economic crisis is at hand.”[2] Read more →