The 3 Big Lessons From America’s Declining Life Expectancy.
The life expectancy of an American boy is four years less than that of a European boy.
Longevity is probably one of the most obvious signs of social progress. The increase in life expectancy can legitimately be considered a cumulative victory. The victory of solidarity over social fatality allows the most fragile to take care of themselves and survive. The victory of science over grandmother's remedies. The victory of physical and health education over ignorance. The victory of the attachment to life over indifference or cynicism regarding working or living conditions.
In the West, the question of longevity seems to me to be a given from now on. So much so that we now speak of life expectancy in “good health”. Today, the issue is not only to grow old instead of dying, but to live to be over 100 years old. There is a kind of innocent luxury that is absent when we talk about retirement age, where suddenly 65 seems to be the beginning of the end of life in “good health”.
Such are the contradictions of our modern societies: beyond the disagreements and conflicts remains this idea that a pillar of our collective project is to live in good health, for as long as possible.
It was therefore with a shudder that I read in the Financial Times “How US life expectancy fell off a cliff” in the summer of 2022 that life expectancy in the United States is falling. More precisely, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, the life expectancy of a boy in the United States, until then equivalent to that of his Western counterparts, had become four years shorter.
Breaking down the comparative longevity curves, journalist John Burn-Murdoch identified three explanatory factors (excluding the pandemic): firearms, obesity, and opioid drugs. The use of opioid drugs is a major factor: last year, there were approximately one million deaths from drug overdoses. These three factors have one thing in common: they are the problems of the poor.
As we know, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the working classes in the United States the hardest, as they are further away from the health system. But the three factors identified are not one-offs or even linked to an epidemic revealing social inequality: they are the very expression of social inequality, its translation, and its face.
Mass killings are a minority among gun deaths, which are mostly found among the youngest, especially African Americans. Obesity is the disease of the classes condemned to industrial junk food and fast food: contrary to Steinbeck's imagery in The Grapes of Wrath, where one would go, emaciated, with his belt increased by three notches, to the West to find something to feed himself and his family, the poor American today weighs 150 kilos of bad fat.
Finally, opioids are a cheap relief for pain that cannot be treated by a doctor who is too expensive, to the point of feeding the new Eldorado of the cartels, which get rich not only from despair but also from the suffering of the most modest. In Europe, we should learn a few lessons from this American situation.
Three lessons from America's falling life expectancy
The first is that social inequality remains, despite medical progress, a marker of the body. In our societies, which are obsessed with the body, both in its glorious affirmation (as a sportsman, supermodel, or starlet) and in its biological negation (the trans phenomenon), there are still, quite simply, rich bodies and poor bodies.
In certain corners of Europe, life expectancy is lower than 60 years. Thus, statistical aggregation should not make us lose sight of the fact that public health if it is accessible to the maximum number of Europeans, does not erase this fundamental divide, which is also a fatality of life.
The second lesson is that health policy is not only a management choice that can be relativized by comparing the American choice of a rather private health system that each person consumes according to his or her individual needs with the European choice of a rather public health system based on national solidarity. The truth is that the choice to treat everyone not according to their financial capacities but according to their pathologies is a choice of civilization.
The third lesson is that our modern western societies may live better and longer than two centuries ago, but they still possess the genius of self-destruction. Weapons, violence, drugs, junk food, suicide: at the heart of our societies, filled with the satisfaction of “living young after 60”, lies the dark aspiration to end it all, to sabotage ourselves. Death no longer comes unjustly or randomly to the newborn or the mother in childbirth: it invites itself by other means and takes its place differently.
Yes, what these curves tell us is that civilization does not need to have barbarians at its gates to collapse: it is within it that the seeds of its dereliction live.
Some reading
Mikhail Gorbachev Will Be Remembered as a Reformer With a Mixed Record for the USSR. He will have achieved only half of what he set out to do when he came to power in March 1985.
Inflation Persists, but the Economy Is Resilient — Investors Face Total Uncertainty. This explains why you can read such different opinions for the coming months.
The Fed Was Totally Wrong on Inflation, but Here Are Some Arguments That Could Exonerate It. The ECB and other major central banks have obviously followed the Fed’s lead.
4 Billion People by 2100 — The World’s Population Could Be Cut in Half by the End of the Century. This is at least the thesis supported by James Pomeroy, an economist at HSBC.
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