Recessions have actually saved lives. But that may no longer be true.
About 15 years ago, death rates among middle-aged white Americans stopped falling and started to climb. It was an unprecedented reversal for a modern industrialized country, and we still don't fully understand why it happened.
The researchers who sounded the alarm — Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton — pointed to rising rates of suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism as possible clues. These so-called diseases of despair can't fully explain why the death rate has stopped improving, but they do hint at an underlying cause: a growing sense of overall malaise about their lives.
