Why Are Badly-Educated White Americans Dying?

Much hand-wringing in the news over new studies showing that the life expectancy of white Americans is falling. For white women without a high school diploma, the expected life span has fallen by 5 years since 1990; for men, it has dropped 3 years. This is a dramatic drop, and several different groups of experts have looked at the data and decided that it is real. Why?

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance. 

I'll throw out another reason: hopelessness. A deep sense that people have no control over their lives. A feeling of being abandoned by the broader community.

As lots of people have noted, poor white people have become increasingly like poor black people. Life among both groups is defined by a sense that they are outside the norm, and not welcome there. By a deep belief that nobody much cares if they live or die.

I think this crisis has two roots: first, the fading of white privilege, which made all white Americans feel better about their own lives because at least they weren't black. Second, the collapse of stable blue collar work.

This is the dark side of the Randian, entrepreneurial, scratch and claw your way to the top world that Republicans from George Will to Mitt Romney have now endorsed. The goal of conservative economics now is to let the marketplace pick winners and losers. That means, you know, that somebody has to lose, and those losers are the ones whose life expectancy is falling.

The only long-term answer is create a world in which winning and losing matter less, in which everybody gets a decent deal regardless of how badly he or she competes. Because we can't all be winners.