Pity the Poor White Guy? Not So Much.

From today's

bbc.com

Are America’s whites really dying faster?

---

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Miners have been a focus of Donald Trump's presidency

America may be one of the richest countries in the world, but the travails of the white working class have captured the nation's imagination - and one struggle in particular.

According to a pair of studies published by two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, middle-aged white Americans are dying at a higher rate than black and Hispanic Americans.

The research has fed a narrative that white Americans are being left behind - a feeling which has intensified with the growing popularity of Donald Trump.

Case and Deaton were looking at mortality rates – the rate at which people die – for Americans between the age of 45 and 54.

In most countries there has been a strong trend for people to live longer over the past 50 years. But in the case of white Americans aged 45-54, mortality appears to have gone the other way.

Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University statistician, says: "The story of white men not having a place in the world - the loss of blue-collar jobs - that's a very popular story.
"It's a story I've been hearing for most of my life. "But the story this data tells is more complicated.

The headline statistic is about 45-54 year-olds, but the average age within that group has changed over the past 15 years.  There was a baby boom in the years following the Second World War, and the people born in that period are now older.  This means that in the early 2000s more 45-54 year-olds were in their mid-40s, while by 2015 more were in their late 40s and early 50s.   Andrew Gelman explained that "during that period your chance of dying increases by about 8% per year".

"The headline-grabbing statistic is that [white middle-aged mortality] went up. After you adjust for age, it's pretty flat," he said.

And when the results are broken down by gender, what has actually happened is that white middle-aged mortality has increased for women rather than for men.

So while it is the plight of the working-class man that tends to get the attention, the mortality data points to women being more important to the overall trend.  There is clearly something important going on, despite the criticisms of Case and Deaton's work. But what is behind this alarming development in American mortality?

Dr Nan Astone is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who has studied the rising mortality of middle-aged white American women.

"We found that about 50% of the increase is due to opioid drug use... for overdose deaths. The other half is really due to an increase in cardiovascular disease and also due to an increase in diseases related to smoking and overeating and drinking," she said.

Although death rates for white Americans are lower than for minorities overall, why some groups of white Americans should be increasingly prone to these unhealthy behaviours remains a mystery.[?]

On average, African-Americans are poorer and have less access to healthcare than white Americans, and yet their death rates are not going up. "It's hard for me to accept the fact that these things which are actually lower for whites are accounting for their increase in death rates," says Nan Astone.

Has America Hit Its Bottom at Last?

Progressives have been on a self-flagellating binge lately: How did we fail to reach those poor folks in  Flyover America? Why oh why don't they see what we stand for? That we're on their side?  What's wrong with our message? Poppycock!  Enough with the analysis already, the answer is as plain as the nose on your face. No rocket surgery degree required.  And Bill Maher should listen up once in a awhile: Christian and Jewish fundamentalists are every bit as scary and dangerous to a liberal society as Muslim ones.

I came across this article today; its subject had been occupying my mind for weeks: the religious fundamentalist nature of current politics. Why wasn't anyone writing about this? All those supposed academics out there? And, LO! here's someone at Alternet doing just that. It's the most sensible analysis I've read anywhere on how and why we got to Trump in the White House, and what if anything can be done about it, and it's really, really good.  And it's the truth, like it or not.

I studied comparative religions in college, particularly the tenets shared by fundamentalist factions of each of the three major  world religions.  Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. All three fundamentalist factions have exactly the same beliefs about themselves and to which their fundamentalist contingent is loyal. If you want to understand why we really ARE two countries, and what should be done about that, if anything, read this article (click here.) 

Here's the author's summation, but do read the whole thing as the writer knows from whence he writes having grown up in the very communities he's writing about. Progressives should stop wringing their hands and get on with the business of building a moral platform that means something to people, that expresses what they actually believe and what they intend to do about the problems we face.

The summation:

"Here are the honest truths that rural Christian white Americans don’t want to accept; until they accept these truths, nothing is going to change:

• Their economic situation is largely the result of voting for supply-side economic policies that have been the largest redistribution of wealth from the bottom/middle to the top in U.S. history.
• Immigrants haven’t taken their jobs. If all immigrants, legal or otherwise, were removed from the U.S., our economy would come to a screeching halt and food prices would soar.
• Immigrants are not responsible for companies moving their plants overseas. The almost exclusively white business owners are responsible, because they care more about their shareholders (who are also mostly white) than about American workers.
• No one is coming for their guns. All that has been proposed during the entire Obama administration is having better background checks.
• Gay people getting married is not a threat to their freedom to believe in whatever white god they want to. No one is going to make their church marry gays, have a gay pastor or accept gays for membership.
• Women having access to birth control doesn’t affect their lives either, especially women they complain about being teenage single mothers.
• Blacks are not “lazy moochers living off their hard-earned tax dollars” any more than many of their fellow rural neighbors. People in need are people in need. People who can’t find jobs because of their circumstances, a changing economy or outsourcing overseas belong to all races.
• They get a tremendous amount of help from the government they complain does nothing for them. From the roads and utility grids they use to farm subsidies, crop insurance and commodities protections, they benefit greatly from government assistance. The Farm Bill is one of the largest financial expenditures by the U.S. government. Without government assistance, their lives would be considerably worse.
• They get the largest share of Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
• They complain about globalization, yet line up like everyone else to get the latest Apple products. They have no problem buying foreign-made guns, scopes and hunting equipment. They don’t think twice about driving trucks whose engines were made in Canada, tires made in Japan, radios made in Korea, and computer parts made in Malaysia.
• They use illicit drugs as much as any other group. But when other people do it is a “moral failing” and they should be severely punished, legally. When they do it, it is a “health crisis” that needs sympathy and attention.
• When jobs dry up for whatever reason, they refuse to relocate but lecture the poor in places like Flint for staying in failing towns.
• They are quick to judge minorities for being “welfare moochers,” but don’t think twice about cashing their welfare checks every month.
• They complain about coastal liberals, but taxes from California and New York cover their farm subsidies, help maintain their highways and keep the hospitals in their sparsely populated rural areas open for business.
• They complain about “the little man being run out of business,” and then turn around and shop at big-box stores.
• They make sure outsiders are not welcome, deny businesses permits to build, then complain about businesses, plants opening up in less rural areas.
• Government has not done enough to help them in many cases, but their local and state governments are almost completely Republican and so are their representatives and senators. Instead of holding them accountable, they vote them into office over and over and over again.
• All the economic policies and ideas that could help rural America belong to the Democratic Party: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, spending on infrastructure, renewable energy growth, slowing down the damage done by climate change, and healthcare reform. All of these and more would really help a lot of rural white Americans.

What I understand is that rural Christian white Americans are entrenched in fundamentalist belief systems; don’t trust people outside their tribe; have been force-fed a diet of misinformation and lies for decades; are unwilling to understand their own situations; and truly believe whites are superior to all races. No amount of understanding is going to change these things or what they believe. No amount of niceties will get them to be introspective. No economic policy put forth by someone outside their tribe is going to be listened to no matter how beneficial it would be for them. I understand rural Christian white America all too well. I understand their fears are based on myths and lies. I understand they feel left behind by a world they don’t understand and don’t really care to. They are willing to vote against their own interests if they can be convinced it will make sure minorities are harmed more. Their Christian beliefs and morals are only extended to fellow white Christians. They are the problem with progress and always will be, because their belief systems are constructed against it.

The problem isn’t a lack of understanding by coastal elites. The problem is a lack of understanding of why rural Christian white America believes, votes, behaves the ways it does by rural Christian white America."