LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Rising Death Rates for Middle-Aged White Americans Are Forcing a Policy Rethink.

Top economists are warning that the alarming uptick in mortality for middle-aged white Americans will force policymakers to rethink the U.S. social safety net.

A report released by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project is the latest paper to highlight how opioids, suicide and chronic liver disease are becoming a greater cause of death among whites age 45 to 54. While middle-age blacks and Latinos have seen steady declines in their mortality in recent years, whites in the same age group saw their mortality increase about 10% between 1999 and 2014.

These white Americans have been hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the fact that their lifespans are suffering correlates with ample research showing that earning less is tied to dying earlier. Now economists are warning that what may seem like a traditional public health problem is a much thornier puzzle that calls for rethinking everything from early childhood education to how the federal government divides up Social Security checks.

“This is a world in which people are dying that shouldn’t be dying,” Angus Deaton, a 2015 Nobel Prize winner and an economist at Princeton University, told an audience at Brookings on Wednesday.

And the elites wonder why people are revolting?