Back 18 months the team of Anne Case and Angus Deaton (who has since gained the economics Nobel) released a famous paper pointing out that white rural Americans were killing themselves. Excellent, so that intuition of mine about those compositional effects was indeed correct at least in part. And I still think there's more than just a hint of compositional effects here. I think that at least some of the answer here is going to come from compositional effects. The people who always would have been richer and lived longer are now in our college educated group, rather than the non-college educated one.

Source: Forbes March 25, 2017 15:33 UTC