A good deal of that is alleviated and managed by care at the job site and personal fitness. Growing up around construction workers, all too many of them did not take care of themselves and the debt was called in later in life. Quite sad, but largely preventable. Of course, this does not protect from non-mitigatable risks, which are non-negligable.

Which (when true--lifting heavy things on a daily basis is eventually deleterious even when one uses proper technique) takes time, which reduces productivity, which isn't acceptable because money.

It is economically smart to burn out people doing "hard work". And it's not like we're going to do much to help them.

Churn and burn joints trying to crank maximum effort at maximum speed do exist in the trades. My observation is that as people acquire skill, they try to avoid avoid such companies. It's simply bad quality output, bad morale, and lousy work conditions.

And that's great! It really is. Except for when you take into account all the other people who aren't so fortunate. That's why I have no real problem with the cultural aversion to that "hard work"--because somebody ends up at the bottom and being at the bottom means they get screwed.

Can you give us an example of how this is preventable? Repeatedly physical stress wears down the body. This is why you see long time weight lifters and runners with worn out joints in middle age.

"long time weight lifters"

Who?

I was into lifting when I was younger. The gossip and locker room wisdom I heard was is if I screwed up a ligament or muscle or joint by doing something really stupid at age 18 I'd heal perhaps three to ten times faster than the old retired guys. Quite a few of the old lifters were damaged goods; because their OT told them to start lifting or get used to being permanently bedridden in the future; they were damaged goods before they started not because of lifting which was medically therapeutic.

So ... doing something stupid has a higher cost for older folks. One interesting solution to that problem, which most HN readers think applies to them, is to apply a high IQ to not doing something stupid. And/or identifying coworkers who are idiots and avoiding working with them.

Anecdotes about individual extreme roid users are not terribly useful unless you're suggesting everyone who gets involved much inherently become an extreme roid user. Amongst the clean rank and file, general health levels were much higher than the general population.

There are a large number of people who have terrible fitness and are 50+ pounds overweight. Many people smoke. I don't have numbers on the correlation with socioeconomic status, but I'm pretty sure that worse fitness and smoking correlate with lower status to a degree (can't recall the news articles on such things, I've read occasional notes on such things). That's borne out by my personal observation.

So basically, if you take the intersection of "bad habits" and "physical work", you wind up with "worse body" as a result. On the other hand, careful maintenance of your body & health habits allows you to do better than your unmaintained colleague. It's hard, but doable.