* Razib Khan points out that the rising death rates is exclusive to downscale whites.
Read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart for how this cohort has changed since 1970. In addition, 45-54 is the peak suicide age for males.
Poor whites are like the Pine Ridge Reservation Indians that Steve sometimes mentions.
Another point is that downscale blacks have seen a greater erosion of their economic status since 2000, but they don’t kill themselves in response. The Suicide Gene is a feature of high latitude populations alone (Nordic whites, Indians, Arctic tribes, Lapps, Japanese, Siberian).
* Maybe the generational explanation is that he “Greatest Generation” remained silent as the country went from being 90% to majority Brown?
They allowed WWII to be reframed as a war against “White racism” in the public mind and didn’t correct the record. Because they liked being patted on the head as heroes so much.
* Drug use and divorce I recall peaking in the late 70′s and very early 80′s. So did several measures of sexual promiscuity.
The mid-70′s were the peak period for middle-middle class incomes relative to the rich. Unions were still powerful, only cheap junk was being made in Asia and Mexico, not cars or appliances, and the stock market was in the crapper.
The first prestige industries taken over by Asians were calculators by the Japanese in the late 70′s, when they were still very expensive, then televisions in the early 80′s, and then video games in the mid-80′s, when Nintendo displaced Atari.
* It’s common for Tribal People to die off like this when they realize their Tribe has no Future.
When they see that they have no place in the New World, that they are Unwanted, Unwelcome Relics of the Old World … they lose the Will to Live.
* Being middle-aged, everyone I know who has died in the last ten years, as well as those I know now who will probably die soon, did a lot of cocaine in the seventies and eighties. Robin Williams didn’t surprise me at all. Cocaine gives you brain damage. Nobody is immune to the damage.
A less robust brain can produce all kinds of other medical problems that might not seem related, but are. Problems that can accelerate aging all over the body, so that the problems compound on themselves, sometimes fairly rapidly. Once you trash the brain, all kinds of things can go wrong, and do.
Being overweight accelerates decrepitude even more rapidly. Too many boomers still think of food as a recreational device.
* It’s also a symptom of depression and anxiety. In this case caused by living in a dying tribe and dying culture.
Trump could replace ‘making America great again’ with ‘let me take you out of your misery brothers and sisters’ and there’d be no substantial difference in the underlying meaning.
