The Deaths of Despair Disaster

The mortality rate for whites aged 45 to 54 in the United States was 1500 per 100,000 per table in the year 1900. By the new millennium it had fallen to 400 per 100,00 people but then something broke. The cause was stalling progress in heart disease and increasing deaths of despair. For those born in 1980, whites without a BA are four times more likely to commit suicide than those with a BA. Black people with BA's are now more likely to live through mid-life than white people without them. What was once called the blue-collar aristocracy in America is now being destroyed.