I'm having difficulty parsing this. Are you claiming that leaders of the United States are deliberately working to decrease life expectancy in the country to reduce the population?
Ironically, can't a lot of the mortality increase be attributed to the tightening of prescription opiate supply? A well intentioned measure seems to be resulting in a fair amount of people dying. Maybe the lesser evil is to just let people dope themselves up with pharmaceutical-grade controls on purity/dosage?
> ...can't a lot of the mortality increase be attributed to the tightening of prescription opiate supply?
How do you figure that?
To the contrary, this article lists drug overdoses as one of the three main causes for the decrease in life expectancy. Wouldn't increasing the availability of opioids increase overdoses?
This thread by Atul Gawande, a doctor, analyzes recent death data from Massachusetts. Several interesting notes, especially this: "The starkest differences in death rates are not by race or gender, but by level of education. People with only a high school degree or less have a 350% higher annual rate of death than others. That's not a typo."
Damn. I have to think it's because the higher level of education required by a rising percentage of jobs is boxing less educated people into more demanding, less engaging, and higher stress jobs that are disappearing.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control shows that a small decrease in life expectancy, from 78.7 to 78.6 years, is part of a continuing trend. Even as we make progress treating cancer, heart disease, and stroke—three of the biggest killers—we’re losing ground on other fronts and have been since 2014. That makes this continuous decline unlike anything we've seen since World War I and the Spanish influenza, which both happened between 1915 and 1918.
Had to re-read 3x times to make sure I was not misreading. Just .1 year? Isn't that within the margin of error or just an expected fluctuation within a much longer trend / hardly anything to lose sleep over, IMHO.
There was a developed country in the late 20th century which suffered a huge decline in life expectancy: Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116380/ Life expectancy falls to 58: "“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars"
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] threadMost wealth in the US is generated by consumerism, so "powers that be' in the US should want to keep people alive.
How do you figure that?
To the contrary, this article lists drug overdoses as one of the three main causes for the decrease in life expectancy. Wouldn't increasing the availability of opioids increase overdoses?
When people can't afford/obtain the oxycontin anymore many will go to heroin.
https://www.twitter.com/atul_gawande/status/1078646188344336...
Had to re-read 3x times to make sure I was not misreading. Just .1 year? Isn't that within the margin of error or just an expected fluctuation within a much longer trend / hardly anything to lose sleep over, IMHO.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/life-expectancy-canada-decrea...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116380/ Life expectancy falls to 58: "“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars"
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7mfr15/why_d... : Reddit thread with sources
While the situation is not nearly on the same scale, perhaps there are some lessons to be drawn in comparison.