More Bad News
The BBC reports on a disturbing new study: Why is death rate rising for white, middle-aged Americans?
While non-whites, younger people and people in other countries are seeing falling death rates, a new study shows the reverse is happening for white men and women in the US aged 45-54.
Covering the period from 1999 to 2013, the study by Princeton University researchers says it is particularly acute for those without a college education.
The data shows that the rates are higher in the South and the West and given that the data set covers the period before and after the Great Recession, the trend doesn’t seem to be strongly influenced by the economy, unless the change occurred in the last century.
4 comments
One more reason to push for a college education, what? This doesn’t surprise me. Before I decided to go to college, I held a decent job, for the time, but the income wasn’t high enough to live a good neighborhood. The people living there were in the same boat. With the amount of drinking we did, and the bad food choices we made, health wasn’t something we worried about. Too, our vehicles weren’t always the safest. 4-wheelers and 3-wheelers were some of the leisure vehicles, and we know they can be dangerous…and so can hunting. PTSD is also a factor for people coming back from the military, and many of them are poor-middle incomes.
Life is more expensive for the poor than the wealthy. If you have the money you can buy more efficient appliances that will pay for themselves with reduced utility costs. People with money pay less to borrow.
Between limited health care, and bad food choices it should be obvious that working class people are going to have reduced life spans.
The change *did* occur in the last century. Since 1973, wages for white males of a given age have been flat or falling. It of course got even worse during the Chimperor’s regime, when even family income (i.e., income *with* a working wife) fell, but the reality is that white males have been doing worse for decades, now. And we already know poverty is bad for your health, since poverty leads to bad food, bad healthcare, bad jobs that expose you to lots of toxic crap and dangerous working conditions, and so forth.
We’re coming in at the end of the elephant blindfolded and marveling at the trunk, but that’s a big-a$$ elephant that we’re ignoring here…
Badtux, it is so difficult to get people to remember last month, trying to get them to remember from Nixon forward is pretty much a lost cause. People still swear that Ronnie Raygun cut taxes ‽
It is most definitely an ‘elephant’ that people are ignoring.