Why Americans are dying younger

[supergee]

The One Bad Break Test

Thanx to Metafilter

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I noticed this a decade ago. In US terms, I'm a late baby boomer (in the UK, I was born at the start of the baby bust—the birthrate fell dramatically around when I was born). People my age or a little older are mostly sicker than their parents, yes, poorer than their parents, and dying younger than those of my parents' generation who survived WW2. I don't think it's just the US and Russia, either, and I think the article places altogether too much emphasis on addiction. (After all, alcohol and tobacco addictions are responsible for many early deaths in my parents' and grandparents' generations. I think that's a War on Drugs deflection, conscious or not.) The appalling health-care system in the US is partly to blame; but that was even worse in previous generations, and there were suicides as a result of the 1929 Crash and the Depression. I ascribe much of the difference to stress. We're not told we're the Greatest Generation; we're told we're ungrateful lumps who need to work, work, work. Some of us, if we live, will get to draw Social Security years later, because we are a demographic problem and unworthy. Some of us, and the following generations, probably won't get it at all. And meantime, not just in the US, the productivity screws are really tight.

I'm glad somebody finally noticed, sort of.