Quote:The “wages of whiteness” (Roediger’s phrase) have not been paying off for any working class peoples, Caucasians included, across the long neoliberal era, Since 1979, productivity has increased eight times faster than pay in the U.S. If the U.S. minimum wage, currently pegged at a pathetic $7.25 an hour, had kept up with productivity it would more than $18 today. Between the late 1980s and today, the average American CEOs pay went from being 59 times higher than the typical U.S. worker’s pay to 301 times higher. Since 1979, the average hourly wage of the nation’s bottom 30% of wage “earners” has risen less than 1% while the top 95th percentile saw a 41% increase.

Quote:This is all critical context for some remarkable data reported across major U.S, media earlier this November. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans,” The New York Times noted: “Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”

Quote:There are three particularly notable things about this recently rising white middle-aged death rate. First, it is driven almost completely by rising mortality among middle-aged working class whites (ages 45-54), with no more than a high school education. Second, the death rate increase of that group is off the charts: it rose by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” according to the Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan Skinner. Working class whites are dying off at such a high rate that they are significantly increasing the death rate for the entire cohort of middle-aged white Americans.

Third, this dramatically spiking white working class mortality is not being driven by standard big working- and lower-class killers like heart disease and diabetes. It reflects instead “an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids” (NYT). Much of the rising death among middle aged working class whites is significantly self-inflicted.