"Visit some formerly middle class suburbs of cities in the Midwest and you can see exactly why this is happening. No decent jobs, no social clubs, no children playing outside, sports tickets out of the budget of anyone but the 1%, no decent restaurants and obesity everywhere. Add decayed infrastructure and empty malls. You should see it. Horrific.
"<p>"These sad statistics should come as no surprise given the pummeling the middle class has taken since 1980. As middle-aged, white males have been fired wholesale by the tens of thousands, battling years of constant unemployment with few or no resources, they have literally reached the end of their means. Broken men are unable to escape from hearing everyday how the executives of their ex-employers are reaping massive profits and personal gains. Their lives are overlaid with exhausted savings and unemployment benefits; all the negatives in their lives beat down on their heads like a ceaseless hailstorm. Finally, swallowing their pride, they turn to the caring myth of family and friends only to find them replaced with the harsh reality of indifferent relatives and unhelpful acquaintances. Too young for Social Security and too old for today's employment prejudices, the unloved and unemployed white males have few options.
"<p>[nytimes comments]
I'm in my 30s, male and ostensibly white by American standards and I've been watching these sorts of trends for a while. Distrust in our certain brand of capitalism has led me to regard America with a wary eye. It has influenced a lot of my life decisions, i.e. stack cash, stay mobile/agile, no spouse, no children, etc. so that I can continually pursue the best jobs no matter when/where they appear. I luckily was able to obtain an EU passport recently via my mother, giving me a few extra countries as potential markets for work but mostly as a hedge against a (probably) meaningless 401k or just the general depressive idea of eventually being an older person in the US. Basically I'll spend my good years putting money away, and as soon as I'm sick (read, need healthcare) or ready to retire, I'll bounce back to the mother country where retirement actually looks like living rather than dying.
Ageism still seems to be very much in play in technology, and a trap to avoid for middle-aged, skilled white men:<p><a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/google-ageism-and-the-business-of-plastic-surgery.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/google-agei...</a><p>This guy had eyelid surgery, shaved his head, and got a pair of Converse "Chucks" to look younger because he was worried about jobs (previous HN submission):<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-idUSBRE8AQ0JK20121127" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i...</a><p>"Don't hire anyone over 30":<p><a href="http://anewdomain.net/2014/12/11/dont-hire-anyone-30-ageism-silicon-valley/" rel="nofollow">http://anewdomain.net/2014/12/11/dont-hire-anyone-30-ageism-...</a>
Maybe my math is wrong, but the raising rate is .134 percent?<p>I'm in that group of guys now. I sometimes wonder if white males are getting enough vitamin D. I never really gave it much thought, until I saw a friend's blood work-up. His doctor is routinely checking his level of vitamin D. I just chalked it up to his good insurance plan.<p>I know I don't get the amount of sunshine my father got. My father always had a tan, and made sure to get outside as much as possible. I, on the other hand, spend too much time looking into a screen. Maybe I'll get a few more years in because I have exercised, but it's been at night for years.<p>Depressing. Sometimes the Internet is really depressing.
I did an analysis a couple years ago and found that drug misuse kills about a third of Americans. Possibly even more if you include the new study that found that the surgeon general's report is undercounting tobacco deaths by 80k per year or whatever, which I didn't because that wasn't out at the time.<p><a href="http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2014/05/the-one-statistic-you-never-hear-about-drugs.html" rel="nofollow">http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2014/05/the-one-sta...</a><p><a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1407211#abstract" rel="nofollow">http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1407211#abstract</a>
It would be interesting to see this broken down by gender. My hunch is it's hitting men harder, but I'm curious if that's reflected in the data.
I may be projecting, but I feel like this is a symptom of our deteriorating middle class. White, now middle aged, men have been hit over and over by free trade, out sourcing and cheap immigrant labor suppressing labor value. Now they're beaten and broken.<p>I've worked with these people and seen it first hand. In my anecdotal experience, depression and drug use isn't just a common case with working class whites, it's nearly the majority. These people know they've been abandoned by society, and a lot of them are just giving up. They're people who have put in 60 hour weeks of hard labor, with little to no health care, for decades and have next to nothing to show for it, and no hope of things improving.
Naked capitalism has found a way to thin the herd more efficiently than the Jonathan Swift ever imagined. A modest proposal indeed.<p>Unrelated: the top NYT comments are better than HN. Sad day.
I must be missing this. I read the article carefully and scanned the comments here. Looks like FUD-bait to me.<p>This is how I would write the article (and this is probably all there is to the article)<p>Over the past 15 years, death rates for whites per 100,000 people aged 45–54 remained basically the same, with the natural increase lifespan being offset by increases in both suicide and alcohol/drug issues. This difference is statistically significant, but it is on the order of 1 or 2 extra deaths per thousand people for their lives from 45-54. It is highly unusual for death rates to change like that. The last great change in the west of this magnitude was with the introduction of HIV/AIDS. For context, the average middle class white american would experience the same increase in risk if they took up canoeing over the same period.<p>But maybe I missed it. I got a graph where one line stays the same where others decline, and I got a graph where risk increases for a couple causes of death by a very small amount (out of dozens not listed)<p>Also I have approximately 50 comments lamenting the rise of third world conditions in places like Peoria and the death of all things good and decent in the USA. I believe if a little more context was provided by the news outlet in this case, perhaps our comments would be more aligned with the actual impact of the news being reported.
You'll never see a black activist or feminist show solidarity with these poor middle-aged white people.<p>The greatest success of capitalism has been dividing people along gender and race lines - not letting them show any class solidarity. If people did, they'd realize that the difference between a poor white and a poor black is a rounding error compared to the difference between a poor guy and a rich guy.
<i>The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.</i><p>This should surprise no one. These are the people who work marginal jobs and they have been the most affected by so much manufacturing moving offshore, the resultant shift to service sector employment, and the downward push on service wages created by massive immigration of unskilled South American workers. (Not to mention the political and social demonization of this cohort.)
Side note: looking at the color choice in figure 3 (<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full...</a>):<p><i>"Census regions are Northeast (blue), Midwest (red), South (black), and West (green)."</i><p>I think they were picked manually. On the one hand, I think picking that makes them more memorable, on the other hand, it surprises me that people in the politically hypercorrect USA would pick those colors this way.
Speaking from experience Im 43 years old but been rejected by women my entire life in LA for being a "white guy" its certainly depressing that no matter how well you do you have to spend your entire life alone have to be ignorant of sexuality because its cut off from you , theres never any reward for my efforts no matter how well i do only puniahment for being born the wrong ethnicity.