In “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st Century,” Princeton Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton follow up on their groundbreaking 2015 paper that revealed a shocking increase in midlife mortality among white non-Hispanic Americans, exploring patterns and contributing factors to the troubling trend....MORE, including download, (60 page PDF)
Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.
The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015.
Case and Deaton find that deaths of despair are rising in parallel for both men and women without a high school degree, and they[sic] deaths of despair have increased in all parts of the country and at every level of urbanization....
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton's Follow-up Paper, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st Century”, Is Out in Draft
From Brookings:
