death rates of white middle class American males

[Eric the Green]

eaths of despair’ are cutting life short for some white 
Deaths of despair are cutting life short for some white Americans

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/deaths-de...americans/





In spite of decades of advancements in health care, diet and safety, white Americans are now living shorter lives, a trend that has surprised experts. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports out of Maysville, Kentucky, an area struggling with an increase in addiction, overdoses and suicide.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now a look at a demographic trend that is surprising the experts.
Despite decades of advancements in health care, diet and safety, middle-aged white Americans are now living shorter, not longer, lives.

Our economics correspondent reports in the latest installment of Making Sense.

PAUL SOLMAN: Maysville, Kentucky, in the northeast corner of the state, just a short bridge away from Ohio, despite some merchants’ best efforts at cosmopolitan outreach, the downtown is struggling. But at one local establishment, business is brisk and growing.

DAVID LAWRENCE, Mason County Coroner: This is the Batesville 20-gauge steel protector.

PAUL SOLMAN: This one is Churchill blue. (speaking about available coffins)

DAVID LAWRENCE: Churchill blue. We can get this in a misty rose for the ladies.

PAUL SOLMAN: David Lawrence manages the Knox & Brothers Funeral Home, is also the county coroner. He’s been seeing a lot of dead white males of late, especially ages 45 to 54.

DAVID LAWRENCE: A lot of it due to alcohol or drug abuse.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM, Family Physician: There has been a Denham practicing medicine.

PAUL SOLMAN: Craig Denham wears multiple hats too.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: This small bag is my grandfather’s medical kit.

PAUL SOLMAN: A fifth-generation Kentucky family physician.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: My great-great-grandfather’s.

PAUL SOLMAN: He’s also medical director for the fire department’s emergency service.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: In the past two, two-and-a-half years, we have had about a 300 percent increase in the drug-related overdose ambulance runs. And the prevalence of opiate addiction in this area continues to increase.

BECKY MANNING, Widow: He’s like, mom, it’s nothing that you did. It’s me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Becky Manning’s son got hooked on drugs. Fortunately, he’s still alive.

BECKY MANNING: Almost 40 now.

PAUL SOLMAN: But she blames the drugs in part for her husband’s suicide.

BECKY MANNING: He just carried this tremendous guilt for everything, for our son doing drugs. Then he started getting depressed, and then my husband took his own life.

PAUL SOLMAN: How did he do it?

BECKY MANNING: He blew his head off. I came home to that.

PAUL SOLMAN: Best friend Marcy Conner’s husband also killed himself.

MARCY CONNER, Widow: He developed alcoholism very young in life.

PAUL SOLMAN: An addiction he shared with lifelong friends.

MARCY CONNER: One died with a heart attack, but drug use and alcohol use played all the way through his life. Another one died of cancer, drank up to the very end. And my husband actually had a G-tube in, a feeding tube in, and poured alcohol down his feeding tube until he died.

BECKY MANNING: Alcohol poisoning.

PAUL SOLMAN: These cases fit a disturbing national pattern. Though U.S. life expectancy has been going up steadily over the last century, there’s now been a sudden and dramatic reversal, for just one demographic.

ANNE CASE, Economist: White non-Hispanics in America, middle-age, are dying in large numbers.

ANGUS DEATON, Economist: It was certainly a huge surprise to me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who are married, published their finding just after Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics.
The paper showed that, starting in 1999, the death rate of middle-aged white Americans has been going up, instead of down.

ANGUS DEATON: We thought we must have made an error. I mean, the whole world is getting better. This middle-aged group is the one that’s benefited most, at least since 1970, from advances in the treatment of heart disease, from people quitting smoking, all of those things. And then suddenly for this trend that’s going down just to reverse out seemed like it had to be wrong. But it wasn’t wrong.

PAUL SOLMAN: The big increase was in what Case calls deaths of despair, alcohol-related liver disease, suicide, drug overdose.

ANNE CASE: People kill themselves slowly with alcohol or drugs, or quickly with a gun. For people aged 50-55, for example, those rates went from 40 per 100,000 to 80 per 100,000 since the turn of the century.
And it’s people with a high school degree or less who are killing themselves in these ways in large numbers. That’s the group that’s getting hammered.

DR. ELLEN KUMLER, Mason County Health Department: And now the CDC is paying more attention to that age group and demographic.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ellen Kumler, a public health doctor for Mason County, Kentucky, says the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control pick up where the Case-Deaton study leaves off.

DR. ELLEN KUMLER: When we look at the suicide rate, when we look at unintentional injuries, a lot possibly related to substance abuse, as well as liver disease, the rates of those issues have actually increased.

PAUL SOLMAN: Marcy Conner is a nurse specializing in substance abuse who has experienced deaths of despair time and again in her own family.

MARCY CONNER: I had a brother that committed suicide, also.

PAUL SOLMAN: And two cousins, one of them a nurse.

MARCY CONNER: And he started telling me that his depression medication wasn’t working as well, and pain medication wasn’t working as well. And he lost his temper at work one night and got fired.

PAUL SOLMAN: Got fired.

MARCY CONNER: They found him hanging in his garage.

PAUL SOLMAN: And the other cousin?

MARCY CONNER: She overdosed.

PAUL SOLMAN: And why so much drug use and abuse? Anne Case and Angus Deaton found something else in their study.

ANNE CASE: Since at least the mid-1990s, people’s reports of pain, of sciatic pain, of neck pain, of lower back pain year on year have increased.

MAN: Our best, strongest pain medicines are the opioids.

PAUL SOLMAN: The mid-’90s was also when the opioid painkiller OxyContin was approved by the FDA, and began to be marketed aggressively to doctors.

MAN: They do not have serious medical side effects, and so these drugs, which I repeat, are our best, strongest pain medications, should be used much more than they are for patients in pain.

PAUL SOLMAN: Within five years, the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma, was earning a billion-dollars-a-year profit on OxyContin, which soon rose to $3 billion. As for the lack of serious side effects? Well, it did have one.

ANGUS DEATON: It’s basically heroin in a pill with an FDA label on the front. So, people get addicted to this.

ELIZABETH EASTON, Recovering Painkiller Addict: I started on oxycodone, or OxyContin, in high school.

PAUL SOLMAN: Elizabeth Easton is now in recovery.

ELIZABETH EASTON: I unleashed something horrid in me many years ago from doing one — one pill. I went from taking them to snorting them to, yes, injecting, which is really, really horrid.

PAUL SOLMAN: Because you have got to have it.

ELIZABETH EASTON: You have to. It’s the only thing that makes you feel normal. And it’s the farthest thing from normal.

BECKY MANNING: It controls your life. You’re a different person.

PAUL SOLMAN: That’s what Becky Manning saw in her son.

BECKY MANNING: Seeking and finding the next high was his priority, no matter who he took down with him.

MARCY CONNER: The brain is telling you, I have got to have it again. I need more. So that’s where you end up with that craving. The craving ends up with, you know, seeking supply.

PAUL SOLMAN: And though lawsuits and a government crackdown have helped curb the supply of OxyContin, cheap heroin is more than filling the void.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: If you can’t get your pain pills that you’re abusing, you’re going to find the source somewhere. And so people are turning to the street drug heroin, which is more dangerous, in the sense that you’re taking something made in somebody’s garage vs. something made in a factory.

CHRISTOPHER RUHM, Economist: In many areas, it’s cheaper to get high on heroin than it would be to get drunk.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economist Chris Ruhm.

CHRISTOPHER RUHM: This is a major health crisis. I mean, drug poisonings have become the biggest source of preventable premature death. So, for example, there are more drug poisoning deaths than car crash deaths. And that’s quite recent.

PAUL SOLMAN: And says Dr. Denham:

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: I’m seeing just as many middle-aged women as I am middle-aged men.

PAUL SOLMAN: Bucking a century-long improvement in white longevity.

DAVID LAWRENCE: People without jobs and people kind of just keeping themselves secluded from others.

PAUL SOLMAN: For the PBS NewsHour, economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting grimly from Maysville, Kentucky.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, next week, Paul returns to Maysville to ask the obvious question: Why the startling increase in deaths in white America?

[Eric the Green]

I might post the next report next week. But meanwhile, what do you think are the causes of this trend?

I have my opinions, of course....

This statistic started with boomers in 1999 from the age of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to about the age of Mark Warner and Lindsay Graham, and has increased markedly since then until today for Xers from the age of Chris Christie to about the age of Marco Rubio. The line runs upward from 1999 to today for those aged 45-54.

It concentrates among those without higher education.

These are the folks who put Trump in the White House. Still enough of them around to do that, I guess.

This sickness is contagious.

Many of them have lost jobs. Many of them are using drugs and overdosing. There is increased social isolation and seclusion. Suicides are rampant.

I think culture is important; the fact that TV, music, movies are so vacuous and negative in these days of the 3T and 4T. This makes a difference. And this extends to decline of social gathering places like churches, union halls, clubs, and families of people that have moved away, with many left behind in red states because of industrial decline. Guns make suicide easy, and drugs and alcohol make self-medication and escape easy.

Americans have such empty lives that if they lose their job, they can't see any purpose for themselves. This is due to the inherent emptiness of our culture, and inability to recognize what life is about, despite the counter-cultural movements that revealed it, but were ignored and condemned in white middle red-state America. Like maybe doing some creative things: the arts, science, entreprenuership, new relationships or family, contributing to and helping others, going back to school, or moving to a blue state where culture and opportunity is greater. Unwillingness to take the financial risk of change because money is too tight. If your life is empty, and thus doesn't get you high or fulfilled on life, it's easier to take a drug or a drink to get a false and addictive high instead. Despair leads to self-destruction.

The economic stresses are caused by computer automation, free trade, and wage and salary decline due to concentration of income for the bosses; plus a failed education and cultural system, and poor social services and lack of investment in public infrastructure.

And of course, you can make the situation even much worse by taking out your frustration and despair on liberals and voting Republican, because you are brainwashed into one of their ideologies that hook you: blame the colored people, blame immigrants, blame PC and identity politics, blame women and feminism, blame non-Christians and lax morality, blame welfare recipients, blame taxes, blame gun control, and don't question the bosses, but look to them for salvation, because they are the "job creaters" and are not "dependent," or you can also fall for religious right nostrums and "make America great again!" or patriotic and militarist slogans. When your life is empty, you can't question authority or think critically and with imagination, and you are ripe fruit and easy pickins for a demagogue like Trump. The result is that there are no social services or income supports to help boost you and your community out of economic ruin and emotional despair. No, that would be dependency on big government, and I am too strong and self-reliant to do that. Oh pardon me, I need to get my fix......

America is sick, literally, and needs a great big change, and soon. Something to blast these people out of their deadly self-defeating patterns! There is a greater destiny for America, hidden in our history and our western and world culture, if only we can find it again. If only we can look past our despair and prejudice.

[SomeGuy]

So, the same thing is happening to Middle America that happened to, say, black people in Northern cities back in the 60s/70s when those factories went away, too?  

Weird.  I wonder if it's something in the water. 

PS Some what related, it would be worthwhile to look at the effects of enclosure on many British peasants prior to the Industrial Revolution.  Read somebody like Henry Fielding bitching about poverty, crime, and vagrancy in British cities in the early 18th century and it sounds almost exactly like a late-20th/early 21st century politician complaining about "those people" today.

[Skabungus]

Here in the flyover states, middle aged white people gather at Sarah's diner for breakfast.  Sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes, coffee, corned beef hash and cigarettes (which they have to smoke out back).  They gather in droves.  They gather at lunch as well for hamburgers and fries, fried fish sandwiches, and pie. For dinner it is the same.  Go to a church function and taco pie, cheesed everything, greasy everything and cigarettes out back.  They talk of TV programs and bingo, card games and beer.  They spend their "off time" in a sedentary practice of some kind.  They are dying and they know it.  They even joke about it between bites, between cigarettes and make jokes about the big pharma commercials on the big screen TV.

They are dying because the world has changed and they don't fit any longer.  They know it too. They don't work anymore because they are retired, laid off or underemployed.  The ones that do work are stressed because they aren't making enough money and don't see a point in the future where they ever will.  They're pissed that Obamacare cost so much so in protest they want to bring it down to be replaced with................pie in the sky?

They want the world to change back to what it was before, where a high school graduate could make $70k.  That's why they voted for the Orange Menace. They want there 'merika back damnit!

Natural selection is a bitch.  Their America isn't coming back, ever, and deep inside they know it.  The stress, the sense of despair, the lack of options keeps them firmly embedded in the only thing they know.  If they give that up then they have nothing. They are being culled from the herd by the passage of time, aided on by poor living habits and a refusal to adapt.

[pbrower2a]

(02-17-2017, 01:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I might post the next report next week. But meanwhile, what do you think are the causes of this trend?

I have my opinions, of course....

This statistic started with boomers in 1999 from the age of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to about the age of Mark Warner and Lindsay Graham, and has increased markedly since then until today for Xers from the age of Chris Christie to about the age of Marco Rubio. The line runs upward from 1999 to today for those aged 45-54.

It concentrates among those without higher education.

These are the folks who put Trump in the White House. Still enough of them around to do that, I guess.

This sickness is contagious.

Many of them have lost jobs. Many of them are using drugs and overdosing. There is increased social isolation and seclusion. Suicides are rampant.

Under-educated people are often materialists without means. It used to be possible to make a good living, a middle-income living, on mining or manufacturing jobs -- but those jobs no longer are available. Or they have become subsistence jobs. The lay-offs are longer and more frequent.

Quote:I think culture is important; the fact that TV, music, movies are so vacuous and negative in these days of the 3T and 4T. This makes a difference. And this extends to decline of social gathering places like churches, union halls, clubs, and families of people that have moved away, with many left behind in red states because of industrial decline. Guns make suicide easy, and drugs and alcohol make self-medication and escape easy.

Let's remember something else about the mass culture: non-rich people over 48 are 'trash' to advertisers on radio and television. Any TV show whose audience is 'old' gets cancelled. They are either set in their brand loyalties or are such capricious shoppers that they can never develop 'brand loyalty' that advertisers so cherish. To be sure, people in midlife can be desirable audiences for advertisers if they have plenty of disposable income that they are willing to spend or invest (on foreign travel, high-end automobiles, real estate, brokerage services, and insurance products) -- but that is not what one can sell to a laid-off miner or factory worker. Blame the mass culture for the plight of such people? There is no mass culture marketed to them.

Quote:Americans have such empty lives that if they lose their job, they can't see any purpose for themselves. This is due to the inherent emptiness of our culture, and inability to recognize what life is about, despite the counter-cultural movements that revealed it, but were ignored and condemned in white middle red-state America. Like maybe doing some creative things: the arts, science, entreprenuership, new relationships or family, contributing to and helping others, going back to school, or moving to a blue state where culture and opportunity is greater. Unwillingness to take the financial risk of change because money is too tight. If your life is empty, and thus doesn't get you high or fulfilled on life, it's easier to take a drug or a drink to get a false and addictive high instead. Despair leads to self-destruction.

Emile Durkheim lives!

The prescribed meaning in life for millions of Americans was long "do your work, don't gripe, and be satisfied with consumerism as your compensation". The place is eastern Kentucky, never known as an intellectual haven, a place of uncritical materialism. When the mines were producing and miners got good wages for infernal work due to the then-powerful United Mine Workers, a miner could often point to his nice car, furniture, appliances, and other evidence of an above-average income, "That's why!"

Because such people are under-educated, they are unlikely to have much exposure to culture other than some folk tradition unique to themselves. They are unlikely to be entrepreneurs because they lack imagination. Doing machine-paced work will kill imagination and curiosity. If they are hooked on drugs or alcohol, they might not be the sorts of people who can develop relationships with younger people because younger people are looking for wholesome relationships with older people. Unions eviscerated, working people are quickly atomized. But pain that causes one to reach for alcohol leads to cirrhosis, a nasty way to go.

Moving to a 'blue' state? What could they do in California or Connecticut -- or for that matter, in such 'blue' cities as Columbus, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, or Louisville? The younger adults can take jobs in higher-technology manufacturing, testing themselves by making 70-mile commutes twice a day until they are no longer on probation and can rent an apartment or buy a trailer. But even that is less than, in real terms, what attracted people from the Mountain South to the auto plants in Greater Detroit.

If you think Kentucky is bad, then wait till you see Ohio and Michigan ten years from now.

Quote:The economic stresses are caused by computer automation, free trade, and wage and salary decline due to concentration of income for the bosses; plus a failed education and cultural system, and poor social services and lack of investment in public infrastructure.

Mirror-image Marxists, the sorts of people who see a Marxist critique of capitalist inequity and exploitation and, contrary to the norm of people who say "Horrible!" or "No longer relevant!" say "WONDERFUL!", now dominate American politics. Such people believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as economic elites get what they want. Entrench them in power and America will be the sort of country that people want to leave -- and not so they can listen to opera at La Scala, visit the Prado, or enjoy the real Budweiser (not to be confused with the slickly-marketed American beer) -- but so that they can be paid fairly for their efforts.

Quote:And of course, you can make the situation even much worse by taking out your frustration and despair on liberals and voting Republican, because you are brainwashed into one of their ideologies that hook you: blame the colored people, blame immigrants, blame PC and identity politics, blame women and feminism, blame non-Christians and lax morality, blame welfare recipients, blame taxes, blame gun control, and don't question the bosses, but look to them for salvation, because they are the "job creaters" and are not "dependent," or you can also fall for religious right nostrums and "make America great again!" or patriotic and militarist slogans. When your life is empty, you can't question authority or think critically and with imagination, and you are ripe fruit and easy pickins for a demagogue like Trump. The result is that there are no social services or income supports to help boost you and your community out of economic ruin and emotional despair. No, that would be dependency on big government, and I am too strong and self-reliant to do that. Oh pardon me, I need to get my fix......

...but these people see the educated middle class as the real oppressors because that lesbian b!+ch at William Jennings Bryan Elementary school corrected the kids' grammar as her mother did back in the '60s and '70s... or that physician with a skullcap won't agree with me on religion, or that black people see something wrong with being shot in the back for shoplifting. They see TV shows in which people mock Donald Trump or commit such horrors as 'race-mixing'. "At least we have a Real American as President now", they say. After all, there is an identity to protect.

Quote:America is sick, literally, and needs a great big change, and soon. Something to blast these people out of their deadly self-defeating patterns! There is a greater destiny for America, hidden in our history and our western and world culture, if only we can find it again. If only we can look past our despair and prejudice.

Their kids will be cannon fodder in the next War for Profits. When such a war goes badly under Donald Trump, those kids will start coming back in body bags.

[SomeGuy]

Speaking of ignorant, resentful people... 

[Eric the Green]

No-one on this thread so far, SomeGuy, unless it's.....

[Eric the Green]

(02-17-2017, 09:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The prescribed meaning in life for millions of Americans was long "do your work, don't gripe, and be satisfied with consumerism as your compensation". The place is eastern Kentucky, never known as an intellectual haven, a place of uncritical materialism. When the mines were producing and miners got good wages for infernal work due to the then-powerful United Mine Workers, a miner could often point to his nice car, furniture, appliances, and other evidence of an above-average income, "That's why!"

Because such people are under-educated, they are unlikely to have much exposure to culture other than some folk tradition unique to themselves. They are unlikely to be entrepreneurs because they lack imagination. Doing machine-paced work will kill imagination and curiosity. If they are hooked on drugs or alcohol, they might not be the sorts of people who can develop relationships with younger people because younger people are looking for wholesome relationships with older people. Unions eviscerated, working people are quickly atomized. But pain that causes one to reach for alcohol leads to cirrhosis, a nasty way to go.

Moving to a 'blue' state? What could they do in California or Connecticut -- or for that matter, in such 'blue' cities as Columbus, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, or Louisville? The younger adults can take jobs in higher-technology manufacturing, testing themselves by making 70-mile commutes twice a day until they are no longer on probation and can rent an apartment or buy a trailer. But even that is less than, in real terms, what attracted people from the Mountain South to the auto plants in Greater Detroit.

If you think Kentucky is bad, then wait till you see Ohio and Michigan ten years from now.

Good points. In the 1980s and 90s, many young people did migrate to the blue states and cities to have a life. And they found it. But now places like California have their own kind of crisis, because they are too desirable. Housing is sky high in price, and the commute saps away our lives. Many poor people are struggling in some places now in blue states too. Higher education is more expensive than it used to be. Many whites from the Rust Belt and the red states would find the increased diversity and "color" of states like CA harder to stomach now.

Quote:Their kids will be cannon fodder in the next War for Profits. When such a war goes badly under Donald Trump, those kids will start coming back in body bags.

We've already had a taste of how badly such wars would go, in Yemen, under Drump. American voters in the Rust Belt and the red states made the choice for an incompetent CiC, and they may pay the price.

[pbrower2a]

(02-17-2017, 11:07 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Speaking of ignorant, resentful people... 

I am speaking of ignorant and resentful people. I know of people who believe in what Donald Trump offered in 2016. They are proud to be white even if they have little else in which to be proud.  Many are scared that their precious daughter might marry and have children by some black man, and have no idea that their daughter could instead end up unmarriageable (if not dead) with a drug habit and STDs because she sleeps around even if only with white johns. Ignorant, resentful people do not make good lives for themselves, and do not prepare their children well for a changing world.

Yes. I hate the direction that America is taking under Donald Trump. I expect very bad things to happen in economics and foreign policy.
Donald Trump is the last sort of person I would want during a potentially-dangerous situation involving military activity. I doubt that I would have so many problems with "President Mitt Romney", who condemned the misogyny, vulgarity, and capriciousness of Donald Trump. I thought that Romney was too narcissistic  and was too connected to economic elites for my taste... But political swings from liberal to conservative are the norm in American political life. Swings from sane to insane are abnormal.

I dislike the chaotic, dictatorial, pay-for-play style of governing that I associate with President Trump. I would dislike this in a President who ran and won with promises of a liberal agenda.

I do not resent the honest successes of middle-class blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. I feel that I have far more in common with them in values than I do with the white people in distress shown in the original post. I have severe doubt that President Trump can solve the problems of such people. But note well that Democrats are not reaching them well, either.

...I am reminded of a study that I saw of differential death rates among poor ethnic groups in Chicago and Philadelphia heat waves. poor whites and blacks had huge increases in death rates during the heat waves. poor Hispanics did not receive such an increase in death rates.  I am guessing that Hispanics just as poor and with even less time in which to establish social networks as poor whites or blacks had some sort of community response that ensured that people who showed signs of having trouble got help. They got box fans from people who cared about them. They did not keep their windows closed out of fear of crime. They did not have the atomization that other poor people endure in America. "Every man for himself" works well enough for economic elites. It works badly for poor people.

Should Democrats get the ability to address the concerns of poor white people, then they can get a New Deal coalition forming around them.

[Marypoza]

Maysville is upRiver from me. A nice charming River town. George Clooney's Dad, Nick, was born & raised there. And the Harsha Bridge that connects it is cool. Think sleek silver-white Golden Gate. Anyhow moving away from the River, south into the mtns you come into an area that's just chock full of meth labs. That's the main business in that part of KY. Just sayin

[SomeGuy]

Quote:I am speaking of ignorant and resentful people.

So am I.

[TnT]

Having become a serious skeptic and cynic, and having looked through the item that began this thread, I'm not finding the appropriate link to solid data supporting this.

??

[SomeGuy]

Are you sure it isn't just being lazy?  Here's the link to the actual study, and here is an abundance of commentary on it.  Just from the first page of the Google search results.


It is truly amazing that the exact same tool that lets you post your questions lets you find the answers, too.

[pbrower2a]

(02-19-2017, 12:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are you sure it isn't just being lazy?  Here's the link to the actual study, and here is an abundance of commentary on it.  Just from the first page of the Google search results.


It is truly amazing that the exact same tool that lets you post your questions lets you find the answers, too.

Although lung cancer is down (people simply do not smoke as much) among white non-Hispanic men between ages 45 and 54, deaths from diabetes has risen slightly (obesity associated with bad dietary practice?) . But put together the decline in lung cancer and the rise in diabetes, and one has a slight improvement.

Chronic liver disease, including cirrhosis, is up -- way up, by nearly a quarter. To be sure, cirrhosis is a symptom of diabetes as well as alcoholism, but cirrhosis is heavily linked to alcoholism. Suicides seem up by about three fifths (60%) to two-thirds (66.7%). Poisonings, a rarity for men between 45 and 54 in 2000, is now more common than lung cancer (still a big killer of middle-aged non-Hispanic white men).

How do people get poisoned? Some of it is accidental. Alcoholics have always been prone to accidental poisonings, but the rate of poisoning has far exceeded in growth in death from chronic liver disease, typically a good proxy for alcoholism. Murder? Poisoners exist, but murder by poison is comparatively rare.

I'm beginning to think that much of the poisoning (unless deaths from drug overdoses) is suicide that medical examiners can rule out as murder but can't distinguish between accident and suicide. Tying a rope to one's neck and a beam and jumping from the beam, pointing a gun at one's head and pulling the trigger, or jumping off a bridge or building is too obvious. Poisoning can easily look like an accident. Motivation could be preventing loved ones from feeling shame or guilt, making sure that one's body is not mutilated, or avoiding a finding of suicide that might negate an insurance claim. Depression and despair are usual companions of suicide, whether from economic ruin or from a slow concatenation of misfortunes for which one has no answers.

So what has changed? In 2000, people between the ages of 45 and 54 were Boomers born between 1946 and 1955. In 2015, people between the ages of 45 and 54 were almost entirely Generation X (men in the study having been born between 1960 and 1970), a generation that Howe and Strauss recognized as "troubled" according to such statistical measures as educational non-performance, crime, and arrests for drugs and alcohol in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Under-educated in contrast to older and younger adults, and more likely to have early criminal records, they were more likely to get hit hard in an economic reality that demanded the education that many never got and the athleticism that fades in all people by age 45.

Boomers had causes or often religion. They could find solace in culture. If you are well educated you might find this



or this



a good reason to continue the struggle of life. Maybe both. I'm not much of a lover of fiction -- it had better be good, indeed really good, if I am to keep reading it.

But if one has only a high-school education and never veered far from the populist culture, one might have no cause to maintain a life that has lost all meaning when one's economic role vanishes.

So need we do to make life precious again so that its enjoyment is not over for all practical purposes at age 45?

[SomeGuy]

I'm going to post this in two threads because it is relevant to each.

[Eric the Green]

Good post, SomeGuy. (I slightly wonder how that happened, but no matter )

Conclusion:

Quote:The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were somehow to find a “Google Translate” function for communicating from real America into the bubble, an important message might be conveyed:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a lot of work to do together to turn this around.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/artic...t-century/

I have felt this all along, although partly for political reasons. The article goes into bad economic, health and mobility trends. My take, being "somewhat partisan" or "vile partisan" in my views, is that on Dec.12, 2000, the 21st century failed to start. The vehicle of progress ran out of gas. The key in the ignition stalled. George Dubya Bush was selected president. If we had been given the chance for blue boomer rule, things might have been way, way different. Since then, the USA has had less than a year of merely semi-progressive rule. That's 20 years now, and counting. Only total control by progressives, which in fact was not attained even during that one partial year, is the only way any reform or investment can happen in our country-- given the fanatical nature of the regressive party. And the notion that "progress" can consist of new high-tech gadgets that are free-marketing successes, is disproven by the real facts as discussed in this article. It's NOT progress at all. It's business as usual. Meanwhile, you can add the climate crisis and the expensive unnecessary wars to the decline of the American people discussed in the article.

The regressive rule to which we have been consigned by the blind allegiance of American voters to the Republican Party, and its successful vote rigging, or by youth's neglect of civic duty, is responsible for the fact that the 21st century is a miserable failure, and in fact has not even started at all. It was, to use a popular culture-wars term, aborted.

And I say we are all entitled to take 20 years off our life, at least in attitude. The country has not been happening, so why should be consider that time has passed at all between 2000 and 2020?

And the roots of this 21st century trend, of course, go back another 20 years.

[SomeGuy]

(02-20-2017, 02:52 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Good post, SomeGuy. (I slightly wonder how that happened, but no matter )

We all make mistakes some time, Eric. 

[TeacherinExile]

(02-20-2017, 02:26 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I'm going to post this in two threads because it is relevant to each.

This article actually has some relevance to the discussion on a third thread, too: Homelanders: Mid 90s or Mid 00s?

On that thread I have recently contended, contrary to Neil Howe's position, that the Millennial generation ended in 2000, giving way to the Homelanders in 2001 with the 9-11 attacks.  This turning is likewise corroborated by another cycle theory to which I subscribe, only in the most general sense.  As with 4T theory, it places great emphasis on social mood, which S&H makes frequent mention of throughout their book.  The stock cycle theory asserts that shifts in social mood are more or less coincident with major peaks and troughs in the US equity markets.  The Year 2000 was just such a turning point, when the dotcom boom went bust, as measured by the NASDAQ index.

[Eric the Green]

I can't find that thread, so I guess I want to answer here. If the year 2001 begins the homelander generation (Z), then it will last for 24 years. The saeculum will not diverge from the cosmic cycle. Well, you heard it here. Check back here after 2025!

[TeacherinExile]

(02-20-2017, 03:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I can't find that thread, so I guess I want to answer here. If the year 2001 begins the homelander generation (Z), then it will last for 24 years. The saeculum will not diverge from the cosmic cycle. Well, you heard it here. Check back here after 2025!

I ran across the same article this morning in The American Conservative, and instantly found it eminently germane to S&H theory.  The passage below written by Nicholas Eberstadt was particularly riveting:

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half...

It is my contention that the Year 2000 is a generational marker, the end of the Millennial cohort.  The 16-year malaise since then, which Eberstadt supports well, could be characterized as a complex Fourth Turning crisis or a hybrid 3T/4T turning (an extended cusp, if that is possible without invalidating S&H theory).