The white people at this Tea Party rally are under the impression that they no longer have a country. Does feeling this way lead many whites to despair and death?
The white people at this tea party rally are under the impression
that they no longer have a country. Does feeling this way lead many whites to despair and death?
Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com

There has been a lot talk these past few days about a paper, "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century," by the economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case. Basically, these investigators found that since 1999, mortality among mainly middle-aged white people has been on the rise. And this is happening at a time when morality rates among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States are in decline. The cause of this rise is not cancer, obesity, or heart disease (those are actually in decline or stable in this group), but direct and indirect forms of self-destruction (suicide, substance abuse). These kinds of deaths are associated with despair.

So, what's going on? Deaton, who just won a Nobel Prize in Economics (an empty prize for the most part), thinks it has something to do with a lost narrative in the lives of middle-aged white America. Black Americans, who are still not doing as well as white Americans, are at least improving—meaning, they have the road-to-freedom narrative to keep them going. Hispanics have some village in the past to ground them ("they may look back to where they came from," says Deaton). Whites do not have a future or past to orient their lives.

The New York Times's Paul Krugman sees some value in this assessment, but he thinks that the situation is not unconnected to the volatility of right-wing politics. In short, all of that rage and bile spewed out of conservative radio stations and Fox News might be physically harming that segment of the population.

Though most white Americans are, by global standards, well off, they are told again and again that everything is wrong with America, that their values are being trampled upon, that immigrants are ruining everything, that black lives now matter more than white lives, and so on. All of these grim fictions are bound to have a real impact. This report might have provided the first evidence of this impact.