Nov 7, 2015 3 min read

What is the hardest passage of life?

None of them is entirely free of tumult, but it could well be that middle age is the toughest of them all.

By the time someone creeps into their 40s or 50s, there’s the realization there are probably more yesterdays behind you than tomorrows ahead. There are pressures to take care of aging parents and, perhaps, recalcitrant teenagers, career pressures and the first hints of aches and pains that signal the fading of youth.

That being said, a study revealed last week found middle age has been particularly brutal for one segment of America’s populace in recent years – working-class whites.

Two Princeton economists found after sifting through data from a variety of agencies that mortality rates among white Americans aged 45 to 54 with just a high school education crept up between 1999 and 2013. No other ethnic group or age bracket saw such an increase in mortality, and there was no corresponding increase in mortality among working-class whites in other countries.

The direct causes, the researchers determined, were an increase in substance abuse in this group, with alcohol, prescription drugs and heroin being the primary culprits, and suicide. But the larger causes are likely the sagging economic prospects of this demographic – they were not faring well before the Great Recession, and their prospects have not appreciably brightened since. The income of households headed by those with just a high school diploma have, in fact, been declining since the 1970s. As many people in this area, and in other parts of the Rust Belt, know all too well, the days of being able to get a diploma one day, a union card the next, and settling into a middle-class life are gone.

Harold Meyerson, a columnist for The Washington Post, observed the outlook for working-class whites in this country has been all too much like that of Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Many Russians met early ends by alcohol poisoning in those days, but “the real cause … was the end of a world that had sustained them.”

Creating a new world that can sustain working-class whites, and stem rising mortality among this cohort, should be among the items high on the agendas of the current crop of presidential candidates and other policymakers. Whether it’s forged by creating new opportunities for education or improved access to health care, America can’t truly claim greatness if it leaves a whole class of its citizens behind.