shock. This is reflected in a marked rise in deaths among white, middle-aged Americans without college degrees, mainly from suicide, prescription drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses. And this is particular to whites: mortality rates for Black and Hispanic Americans in similar demographic brackets are falling. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the Princeton economists who noticed this trend dating back to 1999 and authored a landmark paper on what they term “deaths of despair,” explain the discrepancy as coming down to different prior experiences and expectations, or “the failure of life to
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