David Leonhardt: How working-class life is killing Americans

When economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first published their research on “deaths of despair” five years ago, they focused on middle-aged whites. So many white working-class Americans in their 40s and 50s were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse that the overall mortality rate for the age group was no longer falling — a rare and shocking pattern in a modern society.But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data, it became clear that the grim trends didn&rsquo