Mortality Has Increased Among Middle-Aged Whites in the United States

The trend has come to undo decades of medical progress and improved quality of life. During the last fifteen years, mortality among middle-aged whites increased again, as revealed by a study published Monday in the reports of the American Academy of Sciences. The authors: Angus Deaton, recipient of the Nobel Prize of Economics this year, and his wife Anne Case, economist at the prestigious Princeton University. This reversal is particularly worrying insofar as the United States is the only rich country in the experiment. The phenomenon does not affect any other ethnic group, whether Hispanics or Blacks. According to the authors, this “hecatomb” is comparable to the number of deaths linked to the AIDS epidemic since the appearance of the disease in the 1980s.

Since 1999, the mortality rate among older whites 45-55 years increased by 0.5% each year. Yet even this figure had fallen by an average of 2% per year over the previous two decades. The cause: abuse of alcohol, drugs, and suicide. The economists at the origin of this vast investigation notably explain that access to opiates increased since the end of the 1990s. From 2002 to 2103, the consummation of heroin leapt 63%. The deaths linked to this drug have quadrupled over the past year, according to the data from the Federal Centers of Control and of Prevention of Diseases. According to JAMA Psychiatry, 90% of the people who tried heroin for the first time during the last decade were white.

Economic Difficulties

The phenomenon affects disadvantaged populations most harshly. Mortality has increased 22% since 1998 among middle-aged whites with less education. The percentage of deceased linked to drug and alcohol has quadrupled in those who possess a high school diploma or less. Suicides have increased 81%. The less qualified paid a heavy toll due to the economic downturn. Still, the stress of these economic difficulties has played a role, according to the researchers. “One possible explanation is that for whites their parents had done better economically and they had been doing pretty well. Then all of a sudden the financial floor dropped out from underneath them,” continued economist Jon Skinner on NPR Radio, who co-authored a commentary accompanying the article. “For African-American and Hispanic households things had never been that optimistic and so perhaps the shock wasn’t quite as great.”

Mortality has, however, changed little among middle-aged whites who complete higher levels of education. It even continued to decline among those graduates who completed graduate-level degrees or higher. Today, according to the calculations of Angus Deaton and Anne Case, if the tendency had not reversed among this fringe of the population, nearly a half a million Americans would be still living on this day.