This chart is making the rounds on Twitter:
A paper from a few years ago breaks this down in more detail. After a big pile o' math, here's what it tells us:
Note that the bottom figure is a chart of mortality, so higher is worse. And what it shows is that our middle-aged mortality problem isn't broadly about everyone without a BA. It's specifically about white high school dropouts (the bottom 10% of the education spectrum). The data only goes through 2018, but I imagine that if it included more recent years it would show that the big life expectancy decline due to COVID is also heavily centered on high school dropouts.
Why? One probable factor is 15 years of falling wages from an already paltry level:
Average earnings of the poorest 10% were lower in 2015 than in 2000. It wasn't until 2016 that they started to increase. If the rising mortality rate among high school dropouts really is due to deaths of despair, it's hardly any wonder.
Meth.
Fentanyl, guns, booze, and Covid.
I would guess that meth is as much or more a consequence than a cause. I can’t presume to tell you the weight between cause or consequence.
This says so much about where we are now as a country. It does not preclude racism, since racism is a tool that has been historically used to gain support of just these classes of citizen, by assuring them that A) it isn't their fault and B) there's someone else inferior to you.
Conversely, if you want to say "they are racist" and end there, you're missing a lot of the story.
Today, young white men are told that everything is their fault. They are told that they are racist and toxic.
Young black men are told they are the victims of a system. A system that must be overthrown for them to have any equality at all.
Your comment does not seem like the words of someone who is striving to understand the world, but rather someone who is looking for some way to wave it all away and blame it on somebody else.
I know quite a few young white men that are doing fine, thanks. They can't live the lives of their fathers or grandfathers, though. And that is a bigger change than racial or gender roles. There's also the manufacturing flight which was engineered by the Reagan Administration (not purposely, of course, but that's when it happened - free trade, low interest rates, and so on led to manufacturing flight).
So, young white men do need to be different. People like me try to help them. But some of them, many of them, are beyond my reach.
It is true that there are people that speak very carelessly, make overly broad generalizations, and love to blame and shame. Some of them say exactly the thing you describe.
I doubt there are that many of them, or that they have broad impact.
Do you think I said, "Young white men are to blame for everything"? Because I don't think I said that.
Do you think I said, "Black people are hereby absolved of all responsibility"? Because I'm pretty sure I didn't say that, either.
Low US wages are the result of collusion between the elites in both the US and China. They are not due to "natural market forces."
Doctors have been able to defend their high wages, but the average worker has not.
On another, not entirely unrelated, note:
In the US, it appears that the average wage is pretty high, compared to wages in other countries, but in the US, if you fall below a certain economic level, for any reason, you usually cannot get back up.
Interesting data, but wages are not a reason for the decline in life expectancy. Real wages crashed from 1973 to 1990 and this did not cause a wave of suicides (or whatever happened after 2000):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19pvC
Wages affected black as well as white people - there are probably proportionately more blacks with high-school or less education.
Many people must be looking at the declining mortality but I haven't seen any definitive answer. There are lots of things to consider.
Too many guns; too much opioids and alcohol; too many people without health insurance; too much processed food and not enough exercise.
The US is a rich country that feels, in many ways, like a poor one.
Most of those thing apply to blacks maybe even more than to whites. Gun murders are probably higher among blacks, but this needs to be tested quantitatively. Having guns certainly makes suicide easier. How about opioid use whites vs blacks?
Whites without college in the US still make more than the average in most of the countries which have better life expectancies. Income itself is not an answer. The health care it buys could be.
This is super-relevant (and amazing) data.
So lets encourage. Precisely the people we would be better without.
I thought liberals were compassionate. Do you feel the same way about black men who drop out of high school?
Go away, troll.
This is anecdata, but in my experience (and those of other business owners I know) the problem with this high-school dropout cohort is not that they don't earn enough and don't have any opportunities. It's that they're basically unemployable. They're barely literate. They have behavioral and substance abuse problems that cause them to get fired two days into a job. They live lives of complete chaos and instability that make it almost impossible to function in a modern society.
These people needed services and interventions and mentorship when they were in elementary and middle school and never got it. By the time they fucked up so bad that they dropped out of high school or never bothered to get a GED, there's really nothing to be done. It's no wonder we lose them early to "despair".
I'll say that your anecdotal experiences are similar to mine. To put it another way, there were a lot of what I will quite frankly call louts back in the day at my highschool: guys who not only had no intention of learning anything themselves but also making it as hard as possible for others to learn anything as well. The difference between now and then was that back then there were places for them to occupy and now not so much.
This is of a piece with those people who are ignorant simply because they don't want to learn anything. That is, it's not what is being taught that they object to; it's being taught at all. "What you reading for?" vs "What are you reading?", if you get my drift.
I graduated from HS in 1964 and the problem was rampant then. The "smoke hole", spitballs from the back of the classroom, and kids ruining their brains with the terrible helmets of the 1960's.
And that was when there were still genius-level women at the head of many classrooms.
Figures for black men are worse than for white men. Why does Drum emphasize white men without mentioning black men?
Because, as he says very clearly and multiple times, he's talking about the changes in mortality, rather than the level. If you look at those charts, black male high school dropout mortality is high, but it has not increased.
Life expectancy dropped dramatically in 2020 and continued to drop in 2021. What happened in 2020-2021? What event took place that would cause uneducated men to drop dead?
🤔🤔🤔
This is a tough one to crack, KD.
Figure 4: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/1_Case-Deaton_unembargoed.pdf
dashed line: " estimates of adult life expectancy [...] when COVID mortality is removed and the mortality rate from deaths of despair is held
at its 1992 value"
upper solid line: "the effects of eliminating reported mortality from COVID-19"
lower solid line: Actual
Deaths of despair effect is noticeable at around 2010, even though the trend started around 2000. COVID is responsible for the bulk of the effect of lowering of life expectancy.
__________
An aside.
I'd like to note that one of the biggest impacts of change in life expectancy is whether or not you have ADHD -- https://www.ajmc.com/view/psychologist-barkley-says-life-expectancy-slashed-in-worst-cases-for-those-with-adhd
That makes a lot of sense. Severe ADHD is hard for others to live with. And of course, it's hard for the sufferer to live with. Eventually parents, who bear most of the burden of care die, and siblings are rarer and rarer these days, especially those who stay in the same location.
So the day comes when there is no one related to care for the person, and, let's be honest, while there are SOME absolute Saints who provide care for the suffering, there are a lot of folks who are in it for the buckos, mostly because they can't do anything else themselves.
So the sufferers injure themselves, their cries for help are ignored, and they die.
I love that DeLong posted a chart with a mouse pointer on it.
One of the things to keep in mind is that when a correlation is noted, this does not necessarily imply causation, and when there is causation it can run in an unexpected direction. In this case, I would suggest that people who are "sickly" are likely to be high school dropouts and are likely to have short life expectancies. In other words, lack of education doesn't cause short life expectancy, but rather the factors that cause short life expectancy also tend to cause lack of education.
Further, the high school dropouts are likely to mostly come from the lower percentiles of inherent cognitive ability, and such people tend to win a lot of Darwin awards. Again, reduced life expectancy due to the same factors that cause lack of education, but not reduced life expectancy due to lack of education.
Well isn't THAT "conclusion" convenient for folks who want to throw poor folks overboard. I believe your Orange God calls them "Losers" [with that capital "L"]
Don't feed the troll.
Not a conclusion; just a couple of potentially testable hypotheses. Further, even if those conclusions prove true, it does not follow at all that the poor folks should be "thrown overboard", but knowing the cause(s) of the problems is the first step to designing remedial programs that might actually help.
I think you and I are making the same observation; what you call 'sick' I call 'loutish'.
The US is a country where poor 8th graders who score in the top 10% of math aptitude tests are *less* likely to graduate from college than rich 8th graders who score in the bottom 10%.
But go ahead and insist that our social sorting is due to "inherent cognitive ability."
It is true. Wealthy children have inherent advantages. So do children who have strong families. Life is not fair and never will be.
Which is why it's important to drop the hammer on braying asses like lawnorder who point to oversimplified explanations for things.
Of course, it's also important to try to rectify the unfairness. Countries don't have to be as unequal as the USA.
He may be a braying ass (I disagree, in part because he's more willing than most to give cites) ... but is he wrong?
When it comes to the human sciences, single factor explanations are rare. However, the fact is that cognitive ability is largely determined by your genes, and it is an extremely relevant factor in your ability to benefit from the available educational opportunities.
It would be interesting to see where the none BA life expectancy is for the other counties. An apple to apple comparison would be useful.
“ If the rising mortality rate among high school dropouts really is due to deaths of despair, it's hardly any wonder.”
Amen, brother. …. I feel like those folks have been abandoned by almost everyone. And then they believed the lies that their tough times are the fault of “outsiders”. (Take your pick.) Dealing with big changes in the economy can be really really tough . ( I kinda know. I was in the newspaper business for 32 years until … you know.)
They haven't been abandoned so much as left behind. People who refuse to learn anything on the principle of you ain't the boss of me don't tend to garner a lot of sympathy.
I gather that the Y-axis is ADDITIONAL EXPECTED YEARS OF LIFE from the stated "at 25" not the "expected age of death". Am I understanding correctly?
Yes. The expected ages at death, per the top chart, range from 75-85.
Is this post where I can find the left-wing social Darwinists? Asking for a friend.