This week’s column is a dispatch from the most recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association, in sunny San Diego. It’s on a not-so-sunny subject: the striking rise in mortality rates among working-age white (non-Hispanic) Americans, especially those without college degrees, due to things like suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. The phenomenon has been labeled “deaths of despair” by two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and it isn’t hard to understand why. America’s opioid epidemic has made the crisis of mortality far worse than it (most likely) would have been. But as serious as the opioid situation has become, it is part of a broader, longer lasting social mess which deserves far more study. Life expectancy in America has fallen for three consecutive years: something which hasn’t happened for a century. That is not the sign of a healthy society, in any sense of the word.
Atomized
Atomized
Atomized
This week’s column is a dispatch from the most recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association, in sunny San Diego. It’s on a not-so-sunny subject: the striking rise in mortality rates among working-age white (non-Hispanic) Americans, especially those without college degrees, due to things like suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. The phenomenon has been labeled “deaths of despair” by two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and it isn’t hard to understand why. America’s opioid epidemic has made the crisis of mortality far worse than it (most likely) would have been. But as serious as the opioid situation has become, it is part of a broader, longer lasting social mess which deserves far more study. Life expectancy in America has fallen for three consecutive years: something which hasn’t happened for a century. That is not the sign of a healthy society, in any sense of the word.