> One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will.

Wow...

I had no idea it was that dire. Wow.

Its an incredible statistic, but even from my own upbringing in a white, middle-class suburb I can name a handful of people that have died that I've known, arguably matching that 1/25 statistic even long before it will come to maturity.

I think all of those deaths were OD's.

I'm just a data point, but I lost 12 friends before I was aged 20. This was in the rust belt during the 90s. The reasons ranged across the board: opioids, crack, alcohol, cancer, preventative health conditions, accidents, and suicides. I was always amazed that people didn't report on this kind of stuff back then. But, all of my friends were poor.

"A car-wash manager in Alabama can now earn $125,000, about 50 per cent more than the head of cyber security at the UK Treasury" A bit off-topic but this sums up low-wage Britain pretty well right now. Your tiny house costs £1 million and we want to pay you £50k.

>Your tiny house costs £1 million and we want to pay you £50k.

This is no coincidence. The entire point is to increase the wealth of the wealthiest fraction of a percent without disincentivizing the working class to keep showing up to work every day. Also note this is not a conspiracy but a structural tendency.

Yeap, low growth, low wages, keep the status quo.

Based on a cursory search... London doesn't even build 20k new housing units per year? Astonishing for a city of 9 million people and growing.

Wait until you see all the empty high rises sold to overseas investors lying empty. Like a ghost town around nine elms.

This CDC site https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home says for the year 2020, the leading causes of death for those below age 45: (a) for Whites, it is unintentional injury which includes overdoses and car accidents (b)for Blacks, it is also unintentional injury but homicide is significant (c) for Asian Pacific Islanders, it is unintentional injury, suicide, cancer, and congenital abnormalities.

It's a mix of overly individualistic culture and the healtcare avoidance/unaffordability. Working blue collar class avoids a doctor as much as possible.

This is a huge part, yes. For a shockingly large number of people in the US, going to the doctor means not being able to pay rent or buy food. And in many areas, there are no doctors to go to even if you're willing and able.

We enshrined capitalism only to discover, too late, that we were the capital, not the capitalists.

You are the resource. Capitalism is the exploitation of resources to pull in a profit.

liberals

This isn't a problem exclusive to liberal people or areas. Deeply conservative areas are disproportionately suffering from prescription drug issues and overdose deaths.

Nor does the majority of data we have support their conclusion. As you have alluded to, conservative areas tend to have shorter lifespans when compared to population-dense places, because of issues affecting health. Poverty, age, distance to hospital, all of these things drag down their average.

>Someone with a net household income of about £65,000 or $100,000 will live to an average age of 85 in England, but only 80 in the US.

£65 != $100. The difference is nearly $20,000. How could the author make this mistake. It made it past the FT editors? I must be missing something...

I'm guessing these two salaries correspond to the same percentile of the income distribution.

1. Drug overdoses

2. Obesity

3. Lack of access, due to a lack of affordability and/or availability, to healthcare

I'm a volunteer EMT-B who has a full-time day job so I only work one weekend shift per week and on average I narcan someone once per month. In my state approximately 3,000 people die every year from overdose. Me narcan'ing someone means there's a ~25% chance of them dying in the next year from overdose.

Twice in the last six months someone who was too obese for me and my partner to move by ourselves died while waiting for assistance to arrive.

It's lower controlling for... quite a lot.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/...

The answer is quite simple but no one wants to address the massive elephant in the room.

The future our father's made for us starting in the 1980s is barely live-able. We have continued that tradition forward, and offer nothing new and only most things are worse.

If there is no hope for a better brighter future, people opt out. If you look at the massive amount of suffering, with the unlikelihood of success rational and intelligent people with no hope of a better life, and the prospect of the equivalent of slavery in the future, will opt out rather than suffer.

If you look at the amount of agency people have today compared to two decades ago, you see a stark contrast. We have to take what companies say and accept it we have no choice. Concentration of industry has made it so you can't go to another company because they are all owned by the same main branch doing the same things.

Our methods for changing things for the better have been completely corrupted and eroded.

Our worse, the people we have to pick from for our leaders are deluded and often corrupt, and I don't like saying that but its absolutely true. Just look at the fighting inflation act or whatever its called. We're going to fight inflation by printing more money, yeah that is not how it works.

Every avenue you have for interacting with daily necessities has been reworked without individual rights in mind. A business can ignore you for 30 days before they have some semblance of legal liability. The courts ignore basic rights (abortion), and people being made to be dependent on the system that is on the brink of failure due to overwhelming overregulation and enforced culling of foods.

This is not a coincidence, its planned. The problem with the current trends are you need intelligence to solve these problems, and those who are intelligent simply want to have nothing to do with the problem because its a Kobayashi Maru so long as government gets in the way and they have and will continue to do so until your dead, likely from starvation in the near future.

We have at the upper end 10-50 years before most of humanity will likely be dead, and not enough time to change it because deluded leaders use tactics to delude the people. Its common in any totalitarian society, menticide or the killing of the mind, that is what we have to look forward to.

> The future our father's made for us starting in the 1980s is barely live-able.

> If there is no hope for a better brighter future, people opt out.

We’re trying to make existing economic models work when the human population has doubled in less than a decade. It’s untenable.

>We have at the upper end 10-50 years before most of humanity will likely be dead

I've been hearing that the death of the planet has been 10 - 30 years away for the past 30 years. We're still here.

> I've been hearing that the death of the planet has been 10-30 years away . We're still here.

That argument is solely based on survivor bias.

Also, critical systems are now in such a state of brittle disrepair that it wouldn't take much for everything to break down unexpectedly.

Currency (store of value), Fuel/Energy, Logistics (trains/ cheap shipping), and Food (farms), take your pick.

Any single one of those areas can lead to a cascading failure.

Most people also don't realize as the world heats up you have to suddenly start dealing with problems only commonly found in the tropics but now at the northern latitudes.

If you've read the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, you'd know why the northern latitude countries were able to develop rapidly whereas the tropical latitudes were averse to human life and husbandry.

And 1 billion people live in Africa, the only continent which is now actually growing

Africa is a big continent and that is a big generalization.

I don't see what point you are trying to make by discounting dangers that are studied and very real.

If your life depended on knowing about these things, won't you be surprised when reality hits home.

Its common sense for a rational person to not discount downsides that are easily verifiable.

For your further reading and there's a lot more than just these:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7558156/

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/onchocercia...

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/trypanosomi...

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2020/travel-related-...