Friday, April 7, 2023

Opinion Today: It’s not ‘deaths of despair.’ It’s deaths of children.

"We should be much more focused on protecting our young."
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By Eliza Barclay

Climate Editor, Opinion

About a year before the election that brought Donald Trump to power, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton dropped an extraordinary research paper showing that middle-aged white Americans were dying at faster rates than they were before and no one could explain exactly why. In the following years, the findings were replicated, and Case and Deaton would argue that the phenomenon of middle-aged white men without four-year college degrees dying at higher rates from drug overdoses, alcohol-induced liver disease and suicide were "deaths of despair." The deaths "reflect a long-term and slowly unfolding loss of a way of life," they wrote.

But as David Wallace-Wells writes in his recent newsletter, which is exclusively for Times subscribers, new data on America's ongoing life expectancy crisis — now even worse than it was eight years ago — reveals something different. "Increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers," he notes. Drug overdoses and gun deaths, among other causes, have risen significantly in these age groups. Ultimately, he points out, the new data show us that we need to focus on the health and well-being of our kids.

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