Drug Deaths Increase Among Middle-Aged, White Missourians

In 2015, two Princeton economists made a startling discovery. For decades, public health advances in the U.S. had resulted in life expectancy gains and sharply decreasing mortality rates. This was a well-known trend. What Sir Angus Deaton and Anne Case stumbled upon was that these gains were not benefiting all population subgroups equally. The overall mortality rate for middle-aged, non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. diverged from the downward trend of the previous decades and turned sharply upward in the late 1990s. Moreover, they found that this trend was unique to the U.S. and not experienced in other developed countries, or even by other racial and ethnic groups within the U.S. Appallingly, the study found that if the mortality rate for whites between ages 45 and 54 had continued the same downward trajectory during the previous two decades instead of turning sharply upward, a half a million deaths would have been avoided between 1999 and 2013.

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