Economist Paul Krugman considers and dismisses several explanations: It is not the fault of the welfare state encouraging dependency and despair, because this is a uniquely American phenomenon and the American welfare state is meager compared with other industrialized democracies’. It is probably not caused by “rising inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class,” because Hispanic Americans are much poorer than whites but have lower mortality.
So, what is at the root of this “existential despair,” that afflicts middle-aged whites more than others? And what can be done about it?
I suspect anything anyone says would be guessing, and everyone will come up with something that fits their worldview. FWIW, my guess would be that not only are this group’s (and the group in question is “lower middle class whites”) prospects declining, but society at large continues to view them as privileged and is focused on solving the problems of others (sometimes at their expense).
Well, the study in question (fixed link) defines the subject demographic by ethnicity and age, not by class. Presumably, however, it does reflect the working-class or lower-middle-class death rates more than other classes’ because those whites are more numerous than other classes of whites.
Perception counts more than reality for purposes of this issue.
But FWIW, I would think affirmative action would count, both in the form of admission and hiring preferences, and in promotion of minority-owned business and the like.
The short summary of the argument is that Deaton and Case didn’t adjust for the increase of average age in the 45-54 category, and so the death rate isn’t actually rising when you account for that. On the other hand, even if the criticism is correct it still points out that death rates in many countries for that demographic are falling while that is not the case in the USA, so the study is still probably significant.
If this is a problem of working-class whites specifically, then the explanation might be the decline of opportunity in sectors they traditionally work in – industrial manufacturing, family farming, and small business.
See Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel. Kimmel’s thesis is that AWM have bad reasons to be angry (a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”) and good reasons to be angry (economic marginalization/dispossession), but in either case their anger is misdirected – they are “sending their mail to the wrong address”; whoever or whatever is to blame for their troubles, it is not minorities or immigrants or feminists or liberals or biggummint.
Or they have tighter social support networks. A nuclear family has its advantages relative to multigenerational households, but it also has its downsides. Would not be surprised if this was a factor.
Statistics.
From the cite, the improved summary finding:
"This paper documents a marked flattening in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change ended decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar stasis.
Not to mention that one of the authors is a middle aged white chronic painer… :rolleyes:
(Well, I guess I did mention it, but then my cynicism knows no bounds.)
Some comparison with the great demographic collapse in the former Soviet bloc is useful here, although obviously that one was far larger in scale and consequences. It is undoubtedly one of the ironies of history that the social conservative’s concern with the disastrous consequences of too rapid change was proven most clearly true in the transition of the USSR’s successors to market capitalism in the 1990s with the lifting of price controls, slashing spending, and gutting social welfare programs with not only the direct consequences of economic decline and countless excess deaths but such indirect consequences attributed to collapse of moral values such as rise in violent crime.
Ross Douthat is undoubtedly correct in his recent column to attribute this to a mixture of worsened socioeconomic conditions for working-class/middle-aged white Americans exacerbated by the far more meagre social welfare state here as well as the dissipation of community and family in the past generation. As in Russia, this represents the triumph of Mammon in the guise of both untrammelled neoliberal capitalist and hedonistic atomized individualism. It is undoubtedly an issue that our generation’s politicians must address considering it is a social problem on par with say the disproportionate brutalization by police of blacks or the sad condition of the indigenous races of America and my hope certainly is that the new populistic, economically focused tendencies of the Democratic Party as represented by Bernie Sanders and even the new version of Hillary Clinton will rise to meet this challenge by making the party stand once more for the American workingman, and not be a mere coalition of the bobos and the lumpenproletariat. If not, Trump and the success of the European national right gives us some taste of where politics may head. Considering the even worse condition of the American wwc as opposed to their European counterparts, one wonders what sort of formula American right-wing populism adopt.
All life is suffering; suffering is caused by wanting things you cannot have.
America’s entire philosophy is based on unrestrained wanting. Our whole economy, our whole way of life - Our Dream - is based on wanting things. There is nothing in our education to prepare us for the reality that we won’t actually get what we want.