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MIDDLE-AGE white Americans with limited education are increasingly dying younger than other middle-age adults in the United States, a trend driven by their dwindling economic opportunities, research by two Princeton University economists has found.

The economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, argue in a paper released yesterday that the loss of steady middle-income jobs for those with high school degrees or less has triggered broad problems for this group.

They are more likely than their college-educated counterparts, for example, to be unemployed, unmarried or afflicted with poor health.

“This is a story of the collapse of the white working class,” Deaton said. “The labor market has very much turned against them.”

Those dynamics helped to fuel the rise of President Donald Trump, who won widespread support among whites with a limited education. Yet Deaton said Trump’s policies were unlikely to reverse these trends, particularly the health-care legislation that the president was championing.

“The policies that you see, seem almost perfectly designed to hurt the very people who voted for him,” Deaton said.

Case and Deaton’s paper follows up on research they released in 2015 that documented a sharp increase in mortality among middle-aged whites.

In the paper released yesterday, Case and Deaton found that men without college degrees were less likely to receive rising incomes over time, a trend “consistent with men moving to lower and lower skilled jobs ... That’s the kind of thing that can lead people to despair.”