White non-hispanic are dying: but why? Deconstruction of family, school, learning, training, labour, marriage lead to despair: the old most probable hypothesis

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/anne-case-angus-deaton-study-214987

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/49/15078.full.pdf

This work of Case and Deaton is a fascinating example of academic strong studies about what intuitively observe and don't measure with precision. One point about I have a disagreement: statistics of Europe are not for the same class of age and the same ethnicity. So the comparison is invalid. Indeed we observe the same phenomenon in France for uneducated autochthonous French people. And we are not in the same set of education, the welfare state and redistribution rates, which is not a reason why those parameters could be a causality.

Ce travail de Case et Deaton est un exemple fascinant d'études universitaires solides sur ce que l'on observe intuitivement et ne mesure pas avec précision. Un point sur lequel j'ai un désaccord: les statistiques de l'Europe ne sont pas pour la même classe d'âge et la même ethnicité. Donc, la comparaison est invalide. En effet on observe le même phénomène en France pour les Français autochtones non éduqués. Et nous ne sommes pas dans le même ensemble d'éducation, l'état providence et les taux de redistribution, ce qui n'est pas une raison pour laquelle ces paramètres pourraient être une causalité.

"Anne Case: It’s interesting, because one of the things in the new paper is that mortality rates for black non-Hispanics with a high school degree or less and mortality rates for white non-Hispanics with a high school degree or less are really converging. So there’s been real progress in bringing down mortality rates for blacks, and unfortunately, mortality rates for whites are coming up to meet those. So it seems like we’d be much better off having a conversation about people with less education than we would about people by the color of their skin. I don’t see why this would detract from the fact that all of these people are dying in middle age who have no business dying—black and white. I think there isn’t any reason why we can’t have a conversation about what we do for people in the U.S. who don’t have a college degree, who are facing a labor market that is increasingly hostile—and that’s true regardless of race or ethnicity."




"Politico: So are you talking right now just about working-class whites from 45-54?


Case: Well actually, if you look at every five-year age group, from ages 25-29 up through 60-64, what you see is that for people with less than a college degree, the mortality rates have increased. So it’s not just people in that window; we originally focused on people in that window so that we had something precise to focus on. But when you open it up, it’s happening for a very broad swath of people who you might think of as middle-aged. And I think middle-aged is really in the eye of the beholder.


But when you think about education—what I think is interesting is where we’re planning to go next with our research—is that in Europe, mortality rates are falling, but they’re falling even more for people on the low end of their education distribution. Their mortality is falling faster than people on the high end of their education distribution. So what are they doing right that we’re not? That’s sort of the question right now. And again, education might just be a marker of something else, but I think it would be wise to look at how the Europeans have actually shouldered the kind of changes in the labor market. You know, they’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs to the far East, they’ve weathered the recession, but they haven’t seen the same kind of dysfunction and mortality increases that we’ve seen in the U.S.—so why? What’s that about? We don’t know the answers yet."

"We think the data is consistent with the story where: people enter the labor market, they can’t get a good job, their girlfriend or boyfriend doesn’t want to marry them, because if you leave your options open, you might find someone with a better job. People cohabitate, but those cohabitations are extremely fragile, because unlike Europe, where cohabitation is quite a stable form of living together, in the U.S. it’s much less stable. So there’s just not the kind of stability for people without high school degrees like there has been in the past."