Paul Krugman: The Heartland of Darkness

Paul Krugman looks into The Heartland of Darkness.

This new paper by Angus Deaton and Anne Case on mortality among middle-aged whites has been getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. As a number of people have pointed out, the closest parallel to America’s rising death rates — driven by poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases — is the collapse in Russian life expectancy after the fall of Communism. (No, we’re not doing as badly as that, but still.) What the data look like is a society gripped by despair, with a surge of unhealthy behaviors and an epidemic of drugs, very much including alcohol.

Emphasis Mine

The US Capitalist system is so brutal that it is killing its main supporters: middle-aged, white males. This is the group that is supposed to benefit from the sexism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia, and xenophobia.