Dead, White, and Blue The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites

Dead, White, and Blue
The Great Die-Off of America's Blue Collar Whites 
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”
This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176075/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich%2C_america_to_working_class_whites%3A_drop_dead!/#more