 Cassady Baker, 5, participates in a march in Flint, Mich., aimed at bringing attention to the city's water crisis. (Mac Snyder/Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP) By Jeff Guo For the past year and a half, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have been ringing the alarm about rising mortality among middle-aged white Americans. The pair have attracted a bit of controversy for pointing out these facts. Recently, Pacific Standard's Malcolm Harris suggested that their research, and the way it was presented, put too much emphasis on white mortality — when black mortality has always been worse. "American white privilege is still very much in effect, and no statistical tomfoolery can change that," he wrote. Sam Fulwood III, a fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, worried that Case and Deaton's work would further amplify a growing narrative about white working class woes, to the exclusion of the African American experience. "I worry about how political people will manipulate Case and Deaton's findings to argue for more aid for white people, but ignore the same, long-standing concerns of people of color," he wrote last week. Case and Deaton point out that the trend of increasing white American mortality — higher death rates in middle age — is noteworthy because those death rates have been going down for nearly everyone else: for African Americans, Latino Americans, for people in the U.K. and Germany and France. When we're used to life getting better, it's unusual to see life getting worse. "It's not as much news if people's mortality rates are falling the way you would hope they are falling," Case said in an interview Monday. "What seems like news is when mortality has stopped falling, and no one has noticed that it has stopped." That's what happened in the case of white Americans, she said. 
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