Sometimes simple statistical economic work can open our eyes to some fundamental changes in the economy.

That was the case with landmark research undertaken by Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton. The Princeton economist, working with his wife Anne Case, stumbled on the fact that mortality rates were rising for working-age white Americans since 1999.

For mortality rates to rise instead of fall is extremely rare. It typically takes a war or epidemic for death rates to jump.

Deaton and Case found that these deaths are tied to “deaths of despair” from alcohol, suicide and opioids.

As to the more difficult question of “why” these deaths are taking pace, Deaton hypothesized that they are tied to a destruction of a way of life for working class Americans that used to exist.

“I’ve been using the analogy of the plains Indians, they had had a life which you might have liked or might not have liked before Europeans came to America and that life was destroyed and was never put back together again. I think we’re seeing that for the American working class over the last 40 or 50 years,” he said in a recent speech.

MarketWatch spoke with Deaton about possible explanations for the rising mortality among the working poor and things that can be done to reverse the trend.

MarketWatch: Could you summarize your landmark 2015 research about rising mortality rates among white Americans?

Deaton: We were really looking for something else and then we discovered that, at least among people between 45-54, and even more between 50-54, a decline in mortality, particularly white mortality that had been established for about 100 years had actually stopped or even reversed itself. Whether it has reversed itself or not depends on a bit on your starting point and end point, but the century-long decline in mortality rates that had gone on since the beginning of the 20th century had just stopped and was starting to rise.

And then, what we’ve done was to check and find out why this was happening. Not in the deep sense of why, but which causes of death were associated with this. And we found that the fastest rising causes of death in this group were people dying from suicide, dying from alcoholic liver disease, and dying from drug overdoses.

So that was the initial finding. I guess the other important thing is that is not happening among African Americans, for whom mortality rates continue to fall, in fact are falling quite rapidly and among Hispanics, for whom the trend is good. None of what you see here is happening in European countries. A lot of it is focused on people who do not have a BA, for example.

MarketWatch: Is there any sign that this trend is slowing down?

Deaton: I think in the next few days we will see the data for 2016, but not so far.

MarketWatch: You compared this rise of mortality to the AIDS epidemic.

Deaton: The numbers we’ve given, which were similar to the AIDS epidemic, came from saying “ok, if mortality rates had continued to fall in the way they had prior to 1998, then how many people would be alive that are actually dead,” and that’s how you get that sort of number.

MarketWatch: It is not only opioids?

Deaton: That’s right. I think in the age groups we were looking at among white non-Hispanics, the deaths from opiate overdoses are the biggest part of it, but they are not as big as suicides and cirrhosis added together. Maybe some of these deaths, we should also be putting some heart disease in there. Opioids are certainly the biggest single thing.

MarketWatch: And it is not just men. It is men and women?

Deaton: Yes. I mean most of these rates are lower for women but the increases are parallel for men and women. I mean, women don’t kill themselves as much as men do but the rises have been similar.

MarketWatch: I want to make the bridge from your findings to the economy. You have said that white working class workers are facing a loss of their way of life.

Deaton: This is much more hypothetical because of course, you are saying “what is doing this?” Tying it to the economy is tricky because it is certainly not true that it was the Great Recession that made this happen, for example. And in fact even if you go back to the late 1990s, the patterns of income and so on are not that different across groups. They don’t match up. Any simple story that said “it is the economy stupid,” is stupid.

So we trace this back sort of a long way, and if you look at birth cohorts it is like each successive birth cohort is doing worse. They are more susceptible to these deaths throughout life, and the deaths rise with age more rapidly for younger cohorts, so we’re attracted by this idea that there is a cumulative process going on which is steadily getting worse over time. And, you know, the destruction of the way of life of the white working class is maybe a good way of thinking about this. I mean we are very attracted by that. You know, the ultimate poison may be in the labor market, but, it works through a lot of other bad stuff that is going on — like the decline in marriage rates, the increase in out-of-wedlock childbearing, and all those sort of things. It is those things that get to middle age and your life has not worked out the way you thought, not just in terms of the salary you earned, but also your marital relationship, your kids who you may not know anymore and who are living with someone else. So there are a lot of people who in their 50s that find that their life has just sort of come apart.

One story is just that there has been this slow loss of the white working class life. There has been stagnation in wages for 50 years. If you don’t have a university degree, median wages for those people have actually been going down. So it is just like that model, whereby American capitalism really delivered to people who were not particularly well-educated, seems to be broken.

MarketWatch: What can be done?

Deaton: Well, I think actually quite a bit can be done. And again, this is very tentative work and there are a lot of other economists and other people who are thinking about these issues. Obviously you can’t go back and change history. So you can’t make the last 50 years go away. And many people think, “ok what’s destroyed working class life – the forces of globalization and technical change” – and I’m sure they contributed. But we don’t want to stop them. Globalization and technical change are the guarantee of our future prosperity. And reversing on that will not only make things worse, but it will make things worse for a very large number of people around the world who have benefitted – people in China and India who have been dragged out of the most awful poverty. So we don’t want to do that, but I think there is a realization there is a lot of policies in the U.S. – things are amenable to action – that have actually been contributing to hold down wages.

I could give you a few of those – our catastrophic health-care system seems like a leading candidate there. There is this number that floats around which I think is pretty well-based that we’re wasting about a trillion dollars a year compared with what it would cost if we had one of the other systems you see in Europe or Canada. That trillion dollars a year – much of that is actually coming out of people’s wages – because so many people get health insurance through their employers. So that’s one thing. If you took that money out of the health sector and gave it back to worker’s wages, we would not be in nearly such bad shape.

I think there is a lot of increasing interest in monopoly power, around consolidation in many, many industries and that prices are not falling as rapidly as they should or are rising. And it is real wages we’re talking about here – real wages are, of course, money wages divided by the price level. And so, if you have a system that redistributes money upwards, to CEOs or to hospital executives or whatever, pharma executives, then those people get big increases in their wages which offsets the price increase but the rest of us just get left with the price increase.

I could go on. I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers wages.

MarketWatch: You said in a recent speech that we have to find ways to share and not let it all go to the top.

Deaton: Right. I would even put it more aggressively than that. A lot of people are thinking about rent seeking. There is this sense that it is not just letting it go to the people at the top, it is letting the people at the top get rich on the backs of ordinary people.

That’s a much more aggressive statement. I’m in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.

MarketWatch: You’re doing more research on the “why” and the causes of the rise in mortality.

Deaton: Yes. We’re looking at a lot of different indicators. We want to do a lot more work on Europe because some of the things that have happened here have happened in Europe, but not all of them. So one really interesting question is that median real wages in Britain have fallen since the Great Recession and that 10-year-or-more period is unprecedented in British economic history. So you don’t see these deaths in Britain. You see a little bit, but nothing like what you’ve got in the U.S. So is this what’s in store for Britain, or is this a peculiarly American phenomenon? You can tell that story both ways. That seems a really interesting question. But I do think throwing your hands up and saying it is globalization and technological change is sort of a counsel of despair, and I don’t think we have to go there.