The strange phenomenon of white people dying (I)

In trouble

Anna Case and August Deaton, a pair of famous researchers from Princeton, have crunched some remarkable numbers and come up with shocking conclusions. What they've determined is that rates of mortality and morbidity have increased substantially among white people in later middle-age. 

You read that right. Not blacks, not Hispanics. Among minority populations, morbidity and mortality continues, in fact, to decrease. If Case and Deaton are right, then what we're experiencing is, amazingly enough, more sadness and earlier deaths among white people than among people of color. Not only that, but this trend appears to be gaining speed. 

"This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround," Case and Deaton reported. Amazing, isn't it? Those significantly increasing death rates are "largely accounted for. . .from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis."

Ugly stuff. 

"Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function," their research says, "all point to growing distress in this population."

Why? What's happened in the last 15 years to make so many die earlier? That's a good question.

Last Sunday, Russ Douthat, a conservative columnist for the NY Times, pointed out that such grim figures answer to a conservative view of things. What any of the Republican candidates for President could trumpet is that moral permissiveness and the welfare state has created the dramatic change. Bu if that were true, Douthat says, other permissive, socialist states should be suffering similar horrors--and that's not so. These startling death rates are American's alone.

Liberals could also say "I told you so." Greater despondency and death among older white people in this country, they might well argue, is a result of false religion of trickle-down economics that actually trickles up to the rich and powerful, leaving a wasteland in its wake.

But if that were true, Douthat says, the shocking findings would be the true in our other demographic categories, among African-Americans and Hispanics. But it's not. In fact, death rates among people of color continue to decrease dramatically. 

How else can we explain these sad and awful numbers?

Douthat says that perhaps "working-class white America needs to adapt culturally, in various ways, to this era of relative stagnation, and learn from the resilience of communities that are used to struggling in the shadow of elite neglect."

If you're white, like I am, that sounds particularly draconian. Douthat regularly suffers all kinds of abuse from NY Times readers for being too conservative, but this line seems preposterous for white America, doesn't it?

But think about it. 

When PBS did a historical series of Native America a decade ago, they titled their work, "We Shall Remain." That title resonated with me because in Native American literature and cultural analysis and even in my interviewing I'd begun to hear a testimony from Native people that struck me as unique to them. And it went like this: Given what we've suffered since Europeans came, it's a wonder and a miracle and an indication of our strength that we have survived. "We shall remain."

When white people evaluate their lives, we think and talk about success often in economic terms. A good life achieves something. My father made it clear that I had to go to college because he couldn't. The ethic he bought into was that his children would have a better life--economically speaking--than he did.  

Today, amid our cultural affluence, that ethic is seems a little silly, and largely dead.

What Douthat is suggesting on this very difficult subject is that white folks may have to alter the nature of their dreams and look to other visions to secure happiness, visions that have sustained others.

He may be right.

Success may simply be recorded in survival.

That sounds heretical; but it's not hard to argue that some old myths may well be dying.