 Containers sit in stacks at the Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai on Sept. 24. (Aly Song/Reuters) By Max Ehrenfreund White Americans without a college degree are becoming more likely to die in middle age, reversing decades of progress toward better health. Researchers first noticed this worrisome trend last year. They pointed to increases in opioid abuse, obesity and suicide among the causes of death, but what caused these increases has remained something of a mystery. This week, a pair of economists have advanced a new theory. They suggest that, for many workers, a major shift in the structure of the U.S. economy could have been fatal. The researchers, Justin Pierce and Peter Schott, found evidence that trade with China has resulted in greater rates of suicide and poisonings (including fatal drug overdoses) after 2000, when President Clinton and Republican lawmakers allowed a major increase in imports. Pierce and Schott suggest that as competition with Chinese manufacturing forced U.S. factories to close, many of the Americans who were laid off never got their lives back together. Instead, they fell into depression or addiction. White adults, in particular, suffered from the change in policy. Schott thinks that trade can have important economic benefits on the whole but that his results shows that policymakers need to do more to help those workers who are displaced. 
"I'm in favor of free trade, but I'm also someone who believes that we should be honest about the consequences," Schott said. "It doesn't benefit everyone equally." The economists estimate that the increase in Chinese imports caused an additional 0.4 suicides per 100,000 residents in counties where local economies were vulnerable to competition, relative to the trend in suicide in those places before 2000 and compared with counties that were more insulated from trade with China. | 
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