1 - FYI (because I always forget) those of you who are behind a University firewall might be able to access the article through your university library.
2 - For the rest of us there's a free Bloomberg article out today which makes similar points; probably a follow up from the 2015 study
Very interesting article by the FT about some research into mortality rates among working class whites.
It's the FT, so it's behind a paywall, but key points:
An epidemic of overdoses, suicides and alcohol-related illness is causing a surge in deaths among white Americans with a high-school education or less that now makes them more likely to die early than those who are black or Hispanic, according to research that illustrates the countrys stark social divide.
The acceleration in what economists Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton call deaths of despair among middle-aged white Americans was first documented in their 2015 paper that was held up as one explanation for the popularity with white working-class voters of the then-candidate Donald Trump.
In a paper being presented to a Brookings conference on Friday, Ms Case and Sir Angus, 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, detail a widening educational divide that is expected to cast a shadow over the US economy for years to come.
One recent accelerant, the economists said, had been a surge in addiction to prescription painkillers and to related illegal drugs, such as heroin, that had hit many white working-class and rural communities hard.
Sir Angus and other critics have attributed the roots of that crisis to the routine over-prescription by doctors since the 1990s of highly addictive painkillers such as OxyContin. But Ms Case said white working-class deaths had started to rise before that and pointed to parallel increases in areas such as alcohol abuse and obesity.
There was something rotten going on even before OxyContin was introduced, she said. People want to feed the beast [of despair]. They may do that with drugs. They may do that with alcohol. They may do that with food.