A momentous new report took up just six pages in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The title had no spoilers: “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.” The authors were Anne Case of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
They presented a calm account of a social, political, and ethnic disaster that has struck the United States but no other industrial nation apart from the countries of the former Soviet bloc. In the 15 years between 1998 and 2013, about half a million Americans died years sooner than they should have.