Donald Trump and ‘deaths of despair’ among blue-collar whites
A year before the November election, we told you that a new Princeton University study had found a riveting explanation for the curious viability of a reality TV star turned Republican presidential candidate. From then:
This will sound more than a little gruesome, but if you want to explain Donald Trump, look no further than the increasing rates of suicide and death by drugs among white, middle-aged Americans.
On Thursday, those same two Princeton academics, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, were out with a sequel to their 2015 work, published on the Brookings website:
The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015.
Here’s the video with a more detailed explanation:
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About the Author
Jim Galloway, the newspaper’s former political columnist, was a writer and editor at the AJC for four decades.
