The deaths-of-despair narrative is out of date

MOST ECONOMIC theories come and go with little fanfare. Every once in a while, however, one catches fire. In 2015 Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two Princeton University economists, published a landmark study showing that from the late 1990s the mortality rate of white middle-aged Americans had started to rise after decades of decline—owing to a surge in alcohol-related deaths, fatal drug overdoses and suicides. This “deaths-from-despair” mortality rate has not slowed since: in 2022 more than 200,000 people died from alcohol, drugs or suicide, equivalent to a Boeing 747 falling out of the sky every day with no survivors. Yet even as America’s deaths-of-despair epidemic has intensified, its causes have grown harder to identify.