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Death of the Middle Class – Literally
“Sickness and early death in the white working class could be rooted in poor job prospects for less-educated young people as they first enter the labor market, a situation that compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies.”
I was stunned when I read this article and others describing a study that was conducted in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two celebrated economists, and then updated in a study just released. Our middle class is dying.
In a country that has celebrated its declining mortality rate, due to our success as a nation, we now have a large group of people whose mortality rates are climbing. Case and Deaton describe an increase in “deaths of despair”—people with high school education or less, between 25-54, who suffer from poor job prospects, little hope for the future, drug use and depression. The trends include a decline in marriage, children born out of wedlock and increased physical and mental problems.
At a time when we have seen the gap grow between the successful and the poor, resulting in a shrinking middle class, we may be seeing the manifestation of these social misfortunes.
‘For many Americans, America is starting to fail as a country,’ said James Smith, chair in labor markets and demographic research at the Rand Corp., who wasn’t involved in the paper and said he was struck that mortality rates are rising for young working-class adults. ‘The bad things that are going on in America do not appear to be going on in Western European countries, and that’s a big deal.’
The phenomenon is occurring all across the country, to men and women, both in urban and rural areas, Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton wrote.
Although blacks and Hispanics have had a higher death rate than whites, their rates are going down, while whites have increased, closing the mortality gap.
We’ve been hearing about the shrinking middle class for a long time. When we read these statistics, though, the reality that our fellow Americans are suffering to this degree is deeply disturbing to me. Stories appear that even more middle class Americans are going to lose their jobs through technology improvement, robotics and other types of progress and efficiencies that are sure to displace even more people. Even worse, where do they go for help? More government outlays? We have an enormous number of duplicative job training programs, but are they serving these folks? The medical community? Another group that will be in even more chaos if our health laws and services aren’t straightened out. The churches? Unless the people in need are selective, they may find liberal churches that assure them that their problems are society’s fault, rather than locating churches that empower and encourage them to find their way out of this downward spiral.
Case and Deaton tell us, “…the ills are so deep and complex that it could take many years and many changes in policy to reverse.”
Can we just stand by and watch this happen? Are there steps we can take as a concerned nation to change these dynamics? Do we have a responsibility to take action? What can we possibly do?
Published in Economics
This condition has much to do with why Putin is revered in Russia and why Trump has been elected here. It is also the underlying rationale for the Establishment to categorize them as some form of allies. Both are threats to the agenda that has been dominating Progressive thinking for several decades so the push has been to try to couch this similarity between these two leaders as some kind of military or national defense threat. Progressives hate exercises of traditional state sovereignty and do what they can to eradicate it. What other rational explanation can be set forth for the rabid effort to erase all historical reference to the contributions of white men to civilization and turn this into something taken from others.
I’m wondering if there was something of a “sweet spot” there. Many of my forebears worked until they just made it over retirement age, then were gone a few years later – there is a signal / noise issue in teasing that out as many of my forebears were also heavy drinkers and smokers so a lot of their deaths were due to cancer or lifestyle diseases as much as having been worn out by their jobs.
So we ditched smoking and heavy drinking, but also reduced manual labor – what was the tradeoff? It would be interesting if this study got into sorting out the causes of death, that would be far more revealing I think
[edit to add note, I misread the graph before commenting, so I do see that they are looking at suicides and drug / booze issues].
This raises interesting questions. Widows tend to live longer than widowers. A married man typically loses vitality after his wife dies in old age. Now that single people are more numerous well beyond early adulthood, we might learn that solitude has effects on mortality rates… and possibly greater effects on one sex or the other.
I’ve often wondered about the lousy health habits of our parents and their incredible longevity.
Stess kills. I’ve never gone on any medications to control mine – I went back to nicotine. But the reduced longevity rates as noted in the OP makes me wonder about the side effects of the myriad of prescriptions available for all that ails you
First thought … are we talking about the middle class or the working class? I realize in the US we like to call everyone between living on a government handout and their investment interest “middle class,” but let’s acknowledge reality — there are people who both work and are poor. Poor people committing suicide — intentionally or via drug abuse — does not necessarily mean the middle class is dying. (I’m not saying increases in white working class mortality are not a problem; just that we should characterize the problem fairly.)
Second, let’s actually look the numbers. Note how we are given the final numbers and those scary percentage increases instead of just the before and after, and how these are numbers per 100,000 people. College educated women’s mortality is up 70%! Yeah, from 15 women per 100,000 to 26, and without knowing how big a population they are calling white college educated midlife women, we can’t even get a handle on how many people that is. We can do the same analysis with the other “shocking” trend lines — while they may be true, they have been presented to be as alarming as possible.
Third, in looking at the descriptions, it seems like many of the working class’s problems are self-inflicted. The economy isn’t forcing them to drop out of high school, sire bastards or shoot heroin in their veins. Life is tough; it’s tougher when you’re foolish.
But we had bigger families. My parents both left a parent behind in the old country, but they left them to be looked after by lots of siblings
Okay, here’s a decent number for the actual number of deaths we’re looking at:
So yes, this is certainly a public health problem and we should work to fix it. But let’s also not blow it out of proportion. Hollywood and Broadway didn’t shut down because of AIDS; the white working class isn’t going extinct with quick and slow suicides.
I can’t tell you how many people I know or have spoken to who have cancer or has a friend or relation with cancer. No elderly, all young to middle age 30-50’s. People I have spoken to say its an epidemic – and no history for it. My sister said two of the women she works with husbands just passed away of heart attacks – both in their 50’s. A very well loved local pastor here passed away in his sleep – in his 40’s – young family. I keep hearing things like this and I don’t recall it being to this extent before – very alarming. It has to be diet, stress and environmental issues.
Yes, but the researchers admit that there is a lot more information needed to figure out how to respond to this difficult situation.
In comment #2, Marci referenced an article that discussed people who are isolated. Very interesting stuff. For this study, Aaron, I don’t know if you saw the statement that both men and women’s mortality is affected.
Valid challenges, Amy. I would say that the detailed study (which I didn’t want to repeat in this OP) probably provides more specific data. Second, merging the middle class and working class was “my bad”; the study specifically references the working class. Finally, not everyone had dropped out of high school; again, the study might break down these numbers. The study referred to high school graduates or less education.
Susan, while I wouldn’t characterize National Review’s editorial stance exactly the same way, a fair number of their writers come off as quite callous, I’ve actually been rather shocked at their attitudes and turned off from reading them as frequently as I used to.
I made the point a couple months ago during the ‘binary election’ that I once saw myself saving for one of those NR cruises – now, I don’t think I’d care to share the same table, let alone ship with the majority of them.
I think my challenge, WI Con, and I choose to accept it, is to hold the people in the study accountable for trying to get their lives straightened out, AND also wanting to find a way to help them out of the morass. It’s much easier to condemn them and say get a grip, or show only compassion and not call for them to take control of their lives. I don’t have an answer for this dilemma.
Thanks for filling in the picture, Amy. I didn’t think I blew it out of proportion; it’s been a growing problem and will be very difficult to solve. Whenever we can shine a light on social concerns like this one, I think it’s worthwhile. Perhaps it’s the title that bothered you; it was designed to get people’s attention. Once they read the post, they can decide if they think it’s as serious I do. And if you don’t, that’s fine.
And I don’t think there’s anyone out there saying things are good for people with high school education or less. This is of course why everyone says go to college or a junior college or a trade school.
Much has been made about how a college degree has less to do with being a real qualification for a job and more about signalling to an employer that one is reasonably studious and hard working. (Given how the number of hours a college student spends studying has dropped along with the academic standards, it’s a signal with more and more false positives.) The flip side is that the high school drop-out — a person who couldn’t even show up, behave decently, and put out a modicum of work for four years of high school — is considered even less employable. And frankly, it’s with good reason. Were I filling a position, someone would have to show a very impressive resume of hard work post-dropping-out for me to consider them for any position, even stock work or sales.
Too bad you didn’t phrase it as a question then, because if so, it would be a perfect example of Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Thanks for catching my error–I did mean high school graduate. And I completely agree with your point here. Without at least a high school diploma, their credentials will be sadly lacking.
A clever comment. But I do believe it’s true; I just suspected not everyone would agree.
Maybe I’m missing something, but my take away from the cited statistics is that these kinds of deaths even for the worst group went from around 0.09% to 0.19% (that’s zero-point-one-nine percent). It sounds pretty bad when you say it’s gone up 130%, but it’s still a pretty low figure. The trend is certainly not good, but it doesn’t look like the disaster it’s being made out to be either.
And I’d like to know what the numbers are for other age ranges like 45-49 and 55-59. I would bet that the cited age range was used because it is the worst.
This might just be my imagination, but I think I’ve noticed that those who have long inured themselves to being the object of conservatives’ “tough love” tend not to perceive these remarks as sounding so “quite callous” as those who are perhaps less used to being a target of conservative tough love.
Tough love is in fact rather difficult to express non-callously. If you were already used to getting tough love from conservatives who aren’t paragons (because who is?), but whose sincere concern for your well-being you had learned to trust, perhaps you might have an easier time making allowances for how callous recent advice given by NR writers can sound.
Perhaps in a similar vein, I think I’ve noticed that those with recent first-person experience of suicidal periods (which they obviously survived, which is obviously also its own huge selection effect) tend to be less alarmed by reports of increased suicide rates within a population they might identify with.
Many Ricochetians are highly successful people, unlikely to be candidates for suicide, unlikely to be targets of others’ tough love. It may be particularly shocking for them to imagine either, more shocking than for those already used to it.
I’d assume that most members here recognize the social good, the very real and tangible good, that marriage, family, friends, organized faith and organizations provide but the general culture has not rediscovered these “goods” yet.
Books like Bowling Alone, and Coming Apart have touched on these but politically, Social Conservatives are in retreat/’Injured Reserve’, Traditionalists continued to be marginalized and some of those organizations like those Chambers of Commerce may be undermining communities locally more than they foster economic activity.
These were a whole lot cheaper and tailored to the individual than anything the government has managed to cook up.
No disrespect intended, Theodoric, to either you or @amyschley, but how high would the percentages need to be to represent a serious concern? Yes, we are a country of millions, but behind these percentages are thousands of people. How many would need to die to cause concern for you?
No, NR and other Conservatives have been willing to admit that the phenomenon exists, and to suggest free-market steps to improve it.
Read Kevin Williamson’s article, On The Outside,Looking Out at NRO now. It covers all these issues very well.
Jeez Louise, Susan. You must have a high tolerance level if you don’t think Outlaw was being nasty! He was pretending to be confused about the conservative position on some of these issues, and you and others were pretending to believe him.
America didn’t survive as long as it did because Americans lived forever. It survived because Americans passed on values and faith to the next generation before they died.
If we want to do something, it can only be to start educating young people in what it meant to be an American, and why it’s important that the American spirit be revived.
Woops! Cherry picking.
In 2014, 32,675 people were killed in 29,989 crashes, an average of 90 per day. Are cars killing the working and middle classes too?
Everyone dies. Many people die because of their own choices. We should reduce incentives for them to make bad choices, but unless you want to lock everyone up in bubbles, they’re going to kill themselves intentionally or unintentionally.
Woops! A million-plus people in just couple years. Into a country that had a total population of less than 25 million, according to the 1850 census.
I do have a high tolerance level, former. I also try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they don’t behave well; you’ll note that he apologized and hasn’t done it again. That’s what counts, IMHO.