Anne Case and Angus Deaton are the authors of the book Deaths of Despair — which is also a phrase that refers to the combination of deaths resulting from three causes: suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol.

An epidemic of these deaths of despair started roughly a couple of decades ago. What Anne and Angus have found is that the increase in these deaths was entirely concentrated in people without college degrees. And they have looked at how other gaps between college and non-college folks have also become bigger and bigger in the last fifty years.

They’ve also looked at how that societal division also interacts in important ways with other societal divisions, like racial and ethnic inequality, and geographic inequality. And crucially, how those interactions between these different trends can change over time. Or as Anne says in the chat with Cardiff, the battlefield for understanding these trends is dynamic.

Anne and Angus also discuss with Cardiff the findings of their new study, which shows how Covid has affected mortality rates for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and also for people without college degrees versus people with college degrees (which they further break down by race and ethnicity, gender, and age).