The Depths Of Economic Dispair

Two years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an alarming revelation: Middle-aged white Americans without a college degree were dying in greater numbers, even as people in other developed countries were living longer. The husband-and-wife team argued, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that these white Americans are facing“deaths of despair”—suicide, overdoses from alcohol and drug, and alcohol-related liver disease.