Big fall in life expectancy for less educated white women

Laura Wood has a really interesting post up about mortality rates in the U.S.

The data shows that life expectancy has fallen sharply for less educated whites in the U.S., particularly for less educated white women:

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Over a short period of time (18 years), life expectancy for less educated white women fell by five years, at a time when it was rising for less educated members of other races:

Jesse Powell has also looked at the data and found that life expectancy has fallen for the "prime of life" age bracket of whites of all educational levels, particularly for women. Over a period of just 10 years (1999 to 2009) life expectancy for all white men in the U.S. aged 25 to 54 fell by 3% and for white women it fell by 9%. Again, this compares unfavourably to other races, whose life expectancy rose during the same period.

Even the overall outcomes are not what you might expect. Yes, it's true that whites are still living longer than blacks. But whites are doing worse than Hispanics and a lot worse than Asians.

Here's the data for white women aged 25 to 54 (the lower the score the lower the death rate):

Asian women: 73
Hispanic women: 116
White women: 171
Black women: 276

And remember the rates are improving for all the races except for whites.

How does this reflect on our modern liberal order? Well, liberals would no doubt be happy that the gap between white and black mortality is closing. That fits well with the liberal programme.

But the rest of it doesn't. The gap between rich and poor is growing rather than closing when it comes to life expectancy, in spite of all the wealth transfers arranged by the welfare state. So the liberal programme has failed miserably in that respect.

Nor does feminism seem to have improved the lives of poor white women, or white women in the prime of their lives, as life expectancy has declined rapidly for these groups.

Nor does the data support the idea of whites as a privileged group. Once again it is Asians who do the best when it comes to life expectancy - by a large margin. And Hispanics are also doing considerably better than whites.

Which leaves the question of what has gone wrong for whites? The researchers don't claim to have an answer for the rapid decline of life expectancy amongst less educated white women. And it's difficult to explain this decline when less educated women of other races are improving their life expectancy.

Perhaps part of it is that numbers of women don't cope so well when left to raise families on their own. They would do better with a husband to support them. Sure they can be kept from absolute poverty with the support of the state, but the state isn't there to help them cope with everyday life.

It's possible too that people in this social class rely on a moral culture to help them make good life choices and so have suffered from this moral culture being run down by the Western elites since at least the 1960s. The elites are better at playing a game in which it's thought cool to endorse amoral behaviour whilst still keeping to a traditional morality in your own personal life.