Decline of the working class

One big piece of news in the past couple of weeks has been the release of a new paper by recent economics Nobel winner Angus Deaton and his co-author Anne Case. The paper highlights a very disturbing trend – death rates are increasing for white people in America, especially for working-class, middle-aged whites. The increase looks like it has been going on since the late 1990s.

Among other American groups, such as Hispanics and blacks, mortality has fallen across all age and income groups during the past decade and a half. Death rates have also plunged in Europe and in other rich countries. Although some statisticians later found that the mortality increase was a bit less than reported in the Deaton-Case paper, even a slight increase stands in stark contrast to the decline among all other groups.

The trend is concentrated among the less educated. For college-educated whites, mortality fell, much as it did for other racial groups and other nations. For those with some college, mortality was unchanged – a poor result, but not disastrous. But for white Americans with no college education, deaths have soared.

Something very troubling and very unique is happening to American working-class whites.

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The immediate causes of the increase are not hard to identify. Drugs and suicide are the culprits. There is an epidemic of prescription painkiller, alcohol and heroin abuse among American whites.

But this doesn’t give us a real answer. Why are working-class whites turning to drugs and alcohol? Why are they killing themselves in record numbers? The trend started long before the 2009 recession, so that can’t be the main explanation.

Here’s a possible explanation: Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. economy started trending toward greater inequality. The less-educated lost the semi-skilled jobs that they had held in previous decades. The uneducated class became a floating low-skilled labor force, which decreased the marriageability of white working-class men. That impaired family formation. A couple of decades later, the lack of family support started to take a big bite out of the emotional health of working-class whites, causing them to turn to alcohol, drugs and suicide once they reached middle age.

If true, it means that our laissez-faire, neoliberal economic policy, combined with the pressure of competition from China and other low-wage countries, has had steeper social costs than we anticipated.

Let’s hope economists find out if this, or something else, is behind this worrying deterioration of the working class. •

Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a Bloomberg View columnist.

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