Dr. William Darity, in charge of many things at Duke University, has been steadily advancing his theory of stratification economics, arguing that the ability of one’s parents to contribute to one’s resources is a bigger determinant of economic outcomes than education & hard work. He refers to the fact that blacks who have completed college have only two-thirds the net worth of whites who never finished high school as “one of the most dramatic statistics we’ve discovered.” That dramatic statistic, of course, has long roots.

However, in 2019 Darity, along with epidemiologists Arjumand Siddiqi, and Odmaa Sod-Erdene of the University of Toronto, and others, dug up a worrisome misperception in their report, Growing sense of social status threat and concomitant deaths of despair among whites. Revisiting Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s white “deaths of despair,” they add a third hypothesis to the two already out there, which include either the long-term or the contemporaneous decline in economic conditions driving the alarming trend in mortality.

Darity et al. find that the rise is not restricted to the lowest education groups, but is penetrating “deeper into the education distribution,” although with the most damage occurring among those with lowest educational attainment, and argue that economics alone cannot explain the increase in mortality among whites. If that were the case, the death rate among blacks, who are experiencing “parallel trends, and at more adverse levels,” would also be rising, but it was not pre-Covid. Instead, they point out that demographic groups tend to evaluate their positions relative to other demographic groups, not their peers, and that a rising misperception among whites that their social status is being undermined is a better explanation. Racial and economic anxieties are entangled.

“For perhaps the first time, we are suggesting that a major population health phenomenon – a widespread one – cannot be explained by actual social or economic status disadvantage but instead is driven by perceived threat to status.”

They call their findings stunning and startling, and we’ll add hard to wrap your head around. But if you have the stomach to read some of the racist and anti-Semitic claims being thrown around these days, their hypothesis is definitely worth some thought.

Employment-population ratios have been recovering: the overall EPOP had regained 54.1% of its February-April loss by September, and 62.2% through December. However, in the last two months only half the major demographic groups retained traction, so November and December overall were flat.

That’s graphed below, and here are some highlights: Men overall have gained 5.2 points of their loss, about half women’s 10-point recovery. White & Hispanic women have turned in stronger performances than men, contradicting a popular meme that played off women’s weakness in December.

Women’s EPOP fell by 10 points between February and April, and has regained 6.4%. Men lost 9.6 points and regained 5.7. But since women started with a lower EPOP than men, these translate to larger percentages. However, in December the EPOP for women was 83% of that of men, close to February’s share, after having fallen to 80% at the April low.

Racial and ethnic disparities are far greater than those of gender. Black and Latino EPOPs fell harder than whites’ and have recovered less, with black women showing the weakest recovery of any of the demographic groups shown. One thing dragging down the recovery among black workers is almost certainly the continuing decline in government employment, where they’re heavily overrepresented, with many jobs earning good pay.