Why Did the Death Rate Rise Among Middle-Aged White Americans?

The New Yorker - Cites comments by Ellen Meara, associate professor of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and adjunct associate professor of economics, and Jonathan Skinner, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in Economics, and professor of community and family medicine and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Geisel. They co-authored a commentary on a paper by Princeton economists that showed that middle-aged white Americans are dying in much larger numbers than they used to. Meara and Skinner note that in advanced societies outside wartime, it is very unusual for large groups of the population to see such a jump in mortality rates, and cite the surge in mortality rates among Russian males before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a comparison. (Similar coverage in Vox.)