Anne Case and Angus Deaton have a new paper on white mortality rates. This one is getting attacked a lot more than the 2015 one, though the findings and methods are basically the same — increased death rates for U.S. whites, especially for the uneducated. Andrew Gelman is still on the case (we’ll get to his critique later), but a number of other pundits have now joined in. Thanks in part to these critiques, it’s rapidly becoming conventional-wisdom in some circles that the Case-Deaton result is bunk – one person even called the paper a “bogus report” and criticized me for “falling for” it.
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. CONT.
Noah Smith, Noahpinion