But most of the critics have overstated their case pretty severely here. The Case-Deaton result is not bunk - it's a real and striking finding.
First, let's talk about the most popular critique - Malcolm Harris' post in the Pacific Standard. Josh Zumbrun of the Wall St. Journal had a good counter-takedown on Twitter. Harris notes that the Case-Deaton paper hasn't gone through peer review, but fails to note that the 2015 paper, which said basically the same thing, did go through peer review.
Harris also takes issue with the labeling of non-college-graduates as "working class", but this is a journalistic convention - Case and Deaton themselves use the term "working class" twice in their paper, but only when talking about possible economic explanations for the mortality increase. At no point do they equate "working class" with an educational category; that is entirely something that writers and journalists (including myself) do.
And personally speaking, who really constitutes the "working class" seems like one of those internecine Marxist debates best left in the 1970s. When I use the term to mean "people without a college degree", I specify that that's what I'm talking about.
But Harris' central critique is that, according to him, Case and Deaton have ignored selection effects. Obviously, if more people graduate college, there's a composition effect on the ones who still don't graduate. If mortality goes down by education level, this composition effect (which Harris calls "lagged selection bias") will raise non-college mortality even if mortality rates aren't changing at all. There's a 2015 paper by John Bound et al. (which Case & Deaton cite) showing that once these selection effects are taken into account, "little evidence that survival probabilities declined dramatically" for the lowest education quartile. Harris heavily cites Arline Geronimus, one of Bound's co-authors, who makes a number of disparaging comments about Case & Deaton's papers.
Selection effects are very real (and John Bound is one of the best empirical economists out there). Attrition from the non-college group is important. But as Zumbrun points out, once you lump all white Americans together - which totally eliminates the education selection effect - the mortality increase remains. Just look at this graph from the 2015 paper:
USW is all U.S. whites, independent of education. USH is U.S. Hispanics. The rest are other countries - France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden.
This graph shows two striking things. First, around 2000, the trend for U.S. whites - all educational groups combined - stopped going down and started going up. Bound et al. might not say that qualifies as a "dramatic" increase, but it is clearly an increase, and that fact has nothing to do with education selection effects.
Second, and even more importantly, the USW trend post-2000 is markedly, hugely different from the trends for all other countries AND all other racial groups (though U.S. blacks are not displayed on the graph for some reason, Case & Deaton report that their mortality rates have also been trending downward).
This trend difference is far more important than the absolute change in mortality. It means that while good things are happening throughout the developed world that are causing mortality to fall for almost everyone, U.S. whites are being left out of this trend. Geronimus, Harris, and other critics spill a lot of ink over whether the USW trend is really upward or flat, but this distracts from the real issue, which is the big difference between U.S. whites and everyone else in the developed world.
In my opinion, if Case & Deaton made a mistake, it was to put too much emphasis on education, and not enough emphasis on this stark difference in international and racial trends.
OK, so let's get to Gelman's critique. Whereas Harris and Geronimus are essentially criticizing Case & Deaton for disaggregating the data too much by education level, Gelman and Auerbach (who wrote the Slate article) are criticizing them for aggregating the data too much by race. Gelman & Auerbach have created an enormous database of mortality graphs for Americans of every conceivable combination of race, age, gender and geographical location. They find that there's considerable heterogeneity within U.S. whites - for some subgroups, mortality has been falling.
That's interesting and cool. But it doesn't invalidate the result, as Slate's overzealous headline writer seems to think. Disaggregating just gives us clues for where to look to explain the headline result.
Disaggregation also distracts from the key issue of trend comparison. Gelman & Auerbach, like Harris, and like Bound et al., focus on whether the U.S. white mortality trend - or the trend for this or that subgroup of U.S. whites - is rising, falling, or flat. But the key takeaway from Case & Deaton's research is that U.S. whites aren't sharing in the mortality decline that U.S. nonwhites and Europeans are all enjoying. Gelman & Auerbach don't display any data for European countries, and they don't display demographically matched U.S. whites and nonwhites on the same graphs, making it hard or impossible to do the kind of visual trend comparison that is so easy to do in the Case-Deaton graph above.
Ironically, at the end of his Slate article, Auerbach makes a statement that relies heavily on exactly the type of aggregation that he criticizes Case & Deaton for doing:
Of course, there is one simple story the data does seem to confirm: Minorities still have significantly higher fatality rates than white Americans. But that’s not news.
That might or might not still be true if you add up all U.S. minorities. But for Hispanics, it's false, and has been false for many years. Here's Case & Deaton's graph:
It's also not true for Asian-Americans. Both Asians and Hispanics have lower mortality than their white counterparts. So by saying "minorities still have significantly higher fatality rates than white Americans", Auerbach is rather hilariously failing to disaggregate. (He also might just be plain wrong).
So why are people tripping over themselves to launch attacks on Case & Deaton? It's pretty obviously politics. Here are some excerpts from Harris' post:
[Some] have suggested that the Dems have to renew their focus on white working-class men if they want to win. In this view, liberals have become distracted by so-called “identity” issues like feminism, Black Lives Matter, transgender bathroom access, and the musical Hamilton, thus alienating the underserved voters Donald Trump was then able to nab. Underlying this argument is a series of reports on the immiseration of the white working class and its members’ increasing tendency to die...
[H]ow will this report be understood? I’d wager it’s something like the Brookings blog headline: “Working Class White Americans Are Now Dying in Middle Age at Faster Rates Than Minority Groups.” I asked Geronimus if that was, to her understanding, a true statement: “I think that’s misleading, I really do. Oh boy,” she laughs, “there’s so much wrong with that. That headline makes it sound like problems are worse for white Americans than black Americans.” The narrative is wrong, but it’s not the first time Geronimus has heard it since the election. The Case and Deaton paper, she says, fits conveniently in this story, and it’s one she fears Americans are primed to believe...
In [Case and Deaton's] graphs, white lives literally count more, and black lives less. But whether in health, income, wealth, or educational attainment, American white privilege is still very much in effect, and no statistical tomfoolery can change that.
I'm not sure what "white lives literally count more" means - it seems to be a gross misuse of the word "literal". In any case, it's clear that a lot of the eagerness to trash Case & Deaton's results comes from political reasons.
Is focusing on increasing white mortality a way to preserve white privilege and ignore the problems of black Americans? Maybe. I don't know. Personally, I'd think results like Case & Deaton's would help convince white Americans that the problems of black America aren't due to any unique pathology of black culture, and that white and black Americans are in the same boat together. I'd think it would be a powerful corrective to the poisonous Republican narrative that only black Americans need government help. But again, I'm no expert on how data will get used to create narratives (and I'm not sure anyone is an expert on that).
But anyway, the critiques of Case-Deaton are overdone. Maybe they should have focused less on disaggregating by education, and more on disaggregating by gender, age, and region. But those are quibbles. The main results are real and important.
from Noahpinion http://ift.tt/2ocxXlG