EJ Dionne on mortality rise in white working-class Americans

[MBS]

EJ Dionne comments on the Princeton report on rising mortality among white working class Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-injuries-of-class-turn-fatal/2015/11/11/c90ad6cc-88b4-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html

White working-class voters have been a key building block of the Republican coalition since the rise of the Reagan Democrats 35 years ago. You would think that the party’s presidential candidates would want to respond to the heartbreaking crisis these Americans are facing. . .
. . . among the middle-aged, African American and Hispanic death rates are falling while the rate for whites is going up. And make no mistake: This is a class story. Mortality rates dropped for the middle-aged college-educated; they rose by 22 percent among those with a high school education or less. On the matter of economic inequality, this study should be our fire bell in the night.

But the fire bell was heard only dimly at the two Republican debates in Milwaukee on Tuesday. Indeed, much time was consumed by a vigorous competition over tax proposals aimed at slashing the rates paid by the wealthiest Americans. The candidates were all about flat or flatter taxes, or levies on consumption, which tend to disadvantage lower-income Americans, who are suffering most in this economy. The GOP hopefuls often sounded as if they were addressing a convention of Mercedes owners.
. . .
It's true that in the Democratic forum Friday hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, both Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke a great deal about inequality, and Clinton specifically brought up the death rate study, something Sanders has done on the campaign trail. Democrats have had a white working-class problem for a long time. If they don’t use this campaign to put things right, they will have to take down FDR portraits from the walls of their headquarters and stop claiming to be his party.

The truth is that elites — including many of us in the media — are largely insulated from the brand of despair that is driving so many of our fellow citizens to drink, drugs and suicide. Well-off liberals and conservatives have different ways of evading the realities of lives distant from their own. Will the work of two economists finally convince us that our indifference is unconscionable?

This complements Paul Krugman's earlier commentary on the same Princeton report: http://upload.democraticunderground.com/1016136440

[tblue37]

1. K&R for visibility. nt

[Igel]

2. The divergence by income has been happening for a long time.

It's hitting middle-age. It goes back to the '80s and the loss of high-paid/low-skill jobs, changes in the family, numerous other changes. We see it now, but what happens in middle age is a lagging indicator of what happened when the people were in their teens.

Superficially it's all about money.

Recently Morning Edition had a story about traffic fatalities and education levels. The interviewer pushed the income aspect: low education folk have higher rates of traffic deaths and injuries, and that's because ... Well, lower education correlates with less income and less income correlates with older cars with fewer safety devices, less maintenance, fewer gadgets and possibly living in areas with worse streets or fewer hospitals/trauma centers. At the same time there are other differences--knowledge of laws, social capital, working memory, planning abilities, time of day you're en route, family structure.

Superficially, though, it's all about money. But if you have that M.Eng. you're not very likely to have the same job as somebody who barely graduated high school, and you're also very likely going to have a whole range of differences that go far beyond just how many $ you have sitting around for later use. Give them both an additional $100k/year, you'll see some changes in the low-income person's life. But a year later you'll still see a difference because those differences started early and kept on accruing.

[raccoon]

3. Recd and off to greatest with you. nt

[beltanefauve]

4. K&R

[appalachiablue]

5. K & R. This is very troubling & has been in the works for quite a while. Indifference is a killer.

[tzar paul]

6. like Bill Maher said...

they've finally figured it out

[bemildred]

7. As rate of women dying in childbirth falls globally, US sees rise

While we are on the subject ...

While maternal mortality rates across the globe have decreased by nearly half in the last 25 years, the United States is one of 13 countries where the rate has risen, according to a new survey (PDF) published Thursday by the United Nations and World Bank.

The rate of women dying during childbirth has declined globally by 43 percent since 1990, when U.N. member states launched a series of pledges called the Millennium Development Goals aimed at making significant improvements in global indicators.

A survey led by the U.N.’s World Health Organization estimates there were 303,000 maternal deaths globally in 2015, down from 532,000 in 1990. Over the same period, the approximate global lifetime risk of maternal death fell from 1 in 180 mothers to 1 in 73.

But in the U.S., the rate of mothers dying in childbirth rose from 12 out of 100,000 births to 14 in the years from 1990 to 2015.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/12/global-maternal-mortality-numbers-decline.html