The State of the Union address is an opportunity to identify the problems a president wants to solve. And as we survey American life in 2023, I think there is one problem that really stands out, an issue that embodies a lot about the level of acute crisis in our society.
The declining life expectancy for Americans.
Countries that are growing, rich and healthy generally do not see sharp drops in life expectancy, unless something huge and terrible happens.
Countries that are growing, rich and healthy generally do not see sharp drops in life expectancy, unless something huge and terrible happens. Like the 2021 study that showed “life expectancy plummeted in the successor states of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s” immediately after the fall of the USSR. Or in Syria, where there was a six-year drop in life expectancy during the early years of that country’s brutal civil war.
Clearly, neither of those things is happening here. But something is happening, and there’s no good precedent for it.
For more than a century, life expectancy in this country rose steadily. Every new generation could expect to live longer than its parents. And that is something you typically see as a country attains more wealth; one of the benefits is a longer lifespan. Then something happened.
Life expectancy in the U.S. peaked in 2014, at just shy of 79 years, plateauing there until the pandemic. Then, it began to drop. The graph line just falls away, to a level we have not seen since 1996.
And of course, the pandemic is a big part of this decline over the last few years in places beyond the U.S.
Other wealthy, developed peer countries experienced drops in life expectancy during the pandemic. But on average, those countries suffered smaller drops and have recovered nearly all of the lost years. The U.S., meanwhile, remains in an apparent free fall.
There is a story here about the dark side of American exceptionalism.
As an example, World Bank data shows France has a gross domestic…
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