It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.
You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world.
But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths.
Firearms account for almost half of the increase. Homicide accounted for 6.9 percent of deaths among that group, defined as those 19 years old or younger, and suicide accounted for 6.8 percent, according to a January analysis published in JAMA Network Open. Car crashes and accidental drug overdoses — which the National Center for Health Statistics collates along with other accidental deaths as “unintentional injuries” — accounted for 18.4 percent. In 2021, according to a JAMA essay published in March, more than twice as many kids died from poisoning, including drug overdoses, as from Covid-19. More than three times as many died of suicide, more than four times as many died from homicide, and more than five times as many died in car crashes and other transportation accidents (which began increasing during the pandemic after a long, steady decline).
The new life expectancy studies pick up the thread of work by Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, economists who, beginning in 2015, suggested that a broad social malady was visible in the growing mortality rates of non-college-educated white men in middle age. Their research into what they called “deaths of despair” offered a sort of data-based corollary to a narrative about the country’s left behind, stitched together in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise, in part to make sense of it. In the years since, the same data has invited a whole competitive roster of divergent analyses: that such deaths reflected social dysfunctions driven by ballooning income inequality; that they illustrated health disparities that frequently tracked those inequalities, from obesity and cigarette smoking; that they showcased the country’s threadbare social safety net , which briefly expanded during the pandemic and then abruptly shrank; that they arose from striking declines in what conservatives often call prosocial values like patriotism and religiosity.
The new data tells a somewhat different story. In the big picture, opioids still play a large role, and suicide contributes, too. But that pattern of elevated middle-aged mortality is giving way to a growing crisis of juvenile death. The demographics are shifting away from those narrow markers of class and race identified by Case and Deaton, as well.
Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit. For the richer half, being an American is not quite as bad but is still the equivalent of losing, on average, about two years of life. And this is even though an American earning an income in the 75th percentile is much richer than a Brit at the same income percentile, since American incomes are much higher.
This is not to say that longevity declines are uniform, exactly. Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project. And there is even a notable difference between counties that supported Joe Biden in 2020 and counties that supported Trump.
While the past few years of data are skewed by Covid mortality, you still see the American anomaly even if you subtract the pandemic: In all other nations of that counterfactual world, The Financial Times calculated, life expectancy would have either stabilized or increased, while in the United States the huge surge in violent deaths alone would have cut the country’s life expectancy by a full year.
For earlier generations, life expectancy at birth was often a misleading statistic, because before modern medicine, if a person survived childhood and adolescence, he or she could be expected to live at least to contemporary middle age, and so the remarkably low median life expectancy estimate was suppressed by how many newborns did not make it to 10 or 20. (Thomas Jefferson wasn’t an old man when he wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33, when life expectancy was probably about 45, but only two of his six children with his wife, Martha, survived to adulthood.)
In modern America, a similar if less dramatic threshold appears to have emerged. If you make it to retirement age, you can expect to live about as long as your counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is its own kind of failure, given how much more money Americans spend on health care. But it is merely a waste, not a horror. The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents. The country’s exceptionalism of violence is more striking among the young but extends into early adulthood; from age 25 to 34, Americans’ chances of dying are, by some estimates , more than twice as high, on average, as their counterparts’ in Britain and Japan.
And the death rates are growing at a startling speed. According to that March JAMA essay, the death rate among America’s youths increased by 10.7 percent from 2019 to 2020 and 8.3 percent from 2020 to 2021. The phenomenon was more pronounced among older children and adolescents, but the death rate among those age 1 to 9 increased by 8.4 percent from 2020 to 2021, and almost none of that effect was the result of the pandemic itself.
The pandemic years look even grimmer when we examine pediatric mortality by cause. Guns were responsible for almost half of the increase from 2019 to 2020, as homicides among children age 10 to 19 grew more than 39 percent. Deaths from drug overdoses for that age cohort more than doubled. In 2021, as schools reopened, pediatric deaths from Covid nearly doubled but still accounted for only one-fifth of the increase in overall pediatric deaths — a large increase on top of the previous year’s even larger one.
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Seems there is a 2-tier death system to go along with the '2-tier justice system'.
my DIL is from south america and she is petrified to put my grand daughter into school.
Help her run the numbers to put her mind at ease.
From 2010 through 2021, there were 532 students shot at school, K-12. Of those, 94 were killed. With over 500 million attending school, their chance of being shot are 0.0001064 or being murdered are 0.0000188.
True enough, however, 349,000 have been traumatised.
And that is important. What are we becoming if/when we are all "expanded" PTSD cases? Upcoming psychologists are going to have many field days, plural and days of being overwrought working on the basket cases being 'birthed' today.
By the way, many people are questioning the quality of education in this country; what/where is the qualitative assessments/impact research of the toil gun violence in kindergarten to college level education is taking on school age kids ability to think and concentrate? On the student cost of a lost of innocence?
These kids are seeing, hearing, reading, and watching accounts of abnormal death within their ranks/peers/classmates which should not be! And the adults are 'whistling' pass their headstones!
What a sad commentary on a nation that considers itself ''exceptional''.
Kavika has won my Comment of the Day Award for this article.
There are still a number of areas where America is exceptional, unfortunately the wrong ones were ballyhooed to hide those areas where America was not.
no progress will be made until the least motivated to act are the most affected.
There are significantly more gun related suicides than gun related homicides. How is that not an endemic increase in deaths of despair?
Drug related deaths are about double that of gun related deaths, too. Should we ban painkillers (an apt name) along with guns?
Well, one thing is clear: The United States is a well-informed nation about its circumstances, shortcomings, positives, and negatives. The only thing to fear that I can see if what we allow to happen to the youth of tomorrow. Who are evidently too young and unsophisticated to fix the problems that are threatening them.
The United States is heavily involved in internal strife. . .the youth are our canaries in the coal mind metaphor. We would do well to be attentive and actionable on this. Our birds are drowning on indulgences. Trouble is responsible here: children, youth, or adults?
I think it's appalling that there are members here who "play down" the fact that guns have become the leading cause of deaths of children. Obviously they don't want to imagine that it's THEIR child or grandchild who could possibly be slaughtered. I'm sure as hell worried about my grandchildren in Wisconsin.
Probably because they don't want to spread misinformation and make up claims like that.
IMO anyone who does not support better gun control doesn't want to reduce the gun slaughter of children. I'm entitled to post my opinion whether or not I'm slandered for doing so.
You are entitled to an opinion. You aren't entitled to make up facts.
Yet, it is a fact. Guns are now the #1 cause of death for American children and teens!
YOU'RE telling me what I'm not entitled to do?
Time to confess Buzz, you work for FOX.
No, I'm an undercover agent of the NRA in China. You don't know how frustrating that is.
Ah, so you are entitled to make up facts. I think many people are aware of that.
Yes. Here's a fact for you. Your comment is ignorant.
There you go again, trying to promote an opinion as a fact. Thanks for proving my point.
Maybe YOUR comments are just too serious. At least some of my comments are just playing. But then at least I have a sense of humour - and I don't give a shit if that's called a fact or an opinion.
But then at least I have a sense of humor.
Now that is funny
Buzz, please read my 2.1.2 above. This way I won't have to repost it here.
I read it, and I agree with you. But I questioned the quality of American education even back when I was a teenager.
That's interesting. Because, after all, this nation (somehow) managed to 'master' the world. It says something about the condition of the world as a whole, I suppose. I want to be clear, maybe it is pure grit that has gotten us this far or a mixture of grit and intellect - but, some people in authority are sure endangering our national aptitude when they tell us to accept/model passion void of fact/truth. That is, we have people in these present problems who want us to pretend that we are incapable of managing our tools, guns. With that kind of "understanding" an observant nation could/should 'rush' to invent a version of the non-existent 'phaser' or 'energy gun' and ship them to well, ordinary citizens in the U.S. and let 'them' hastily exterminate themselves in ever swelling numbers!
You don't know how much I've wanted Klaatu and Gort to return and vapourize all weapons used for killing people.
Now that's funny.
You will note that in the recent comments above, what we REALLY have to be concerned about here is the.......
"Book 'em, Dano!" * Especially that one down 'far left'!
* Hawaii Five-O.
Some here play down the threat of drug overdoses, particularly, fentanyl
School shootings are very rare in the US, rampant opioid and other drug abuse is not.
Soft on crime leftists routinely downgrade these felonies to misdemeanors, refuse to prosecute, and send the perps right back out into the neighborhoods.
The wonder is if some conservatives can't find something to criticize about the opposition would a conservative write at all! Happy Easter!
When it comes to school shootings, "None is too many." (a quote from Canadian Prime Minister McKenzie King, when asked how many refugee Jews he would allow to come to Canada at the end of WW2, a quote that lives on as the title of a book about the times).
You will note that one thing they will do is deflect away from deaths caused by firearms - it's always "mental health issues" or "drugs" or whatever they can come up with as long as it isn't guns.
Good morning, 'America'. . . we open our eyes (West Coast time). . .to another mass shooting this time in the 'land of McConnell.'
Morning, Buzz, it's happened again. . . . five deaths. . . six injuries. . . including one police officer. . . Louisville, Kentucky. Old National Bank.
What is already being repeated in the news preliminarily is an employee at the bank with mental health issues . . . .
I can't get past that one soundbite: A bank employee with mental health issues? Sounds oxymoronic, to me.
How the "h" does a 'mental' person function in a banking environment? Well we're have to wait to find out more!
Connor Sturgeon had a BS in Commerce and Business Administration and a Masters in Finance and he reportedly texted a friend before the shooting saying he was feeling suicidal and “would shoot up the bank”. He self-identified as he/him.
As I've said a few times already, CB, at least one mass shooting every day is NOT news in America. What WOULD be news is a day that goes by WITHOUT one.
Neither cited AMA study says this.
Looks like the national news missed another mass shooting in Florida yesterday.
Police: 3 dead after Orlando park shooting during Easter egg hunt
There was another 2 or 3 days ago when four were killed and I don't believe that it made any headlines outside of the imminent Florida area.
I'm sure that thoughts and prayers are going to do a lot of good. /S