The First Rich Country to Stop Living Longer
American life expectancy fell three years running, in peacetime, with no plague. The last developed country to manage that was the Soviet Union, on its way down.
Between 2014 and 2017, life expectancy in the United States fell three years running.
Read that again, because the habit of skimming past numbers will cost you the point. Not growth slowing. Not a bad quarter. The length of the average American life got shorter, three years in a row, in the richest society that has ever existed, during peacetime, with no plague and no famine.
The last developed country to manage that was the Soviet Union, on its way down.
I want to hold that against the headline numbers, because the headline numbers are genuinely impressive and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
American output is somewhere past twenty-eight trillion dollars a year. The market keeps setting records. Corporate profits are strong. The technology sector produces things that would have read as sorcery two generations ago. By any measure of aggregate production, this is the most productive civilisation in human history, and nothing in this essay disputes that.
The trouble is that aggregate figures answer a question almost nobody is actually asking. They tell you how much is produced. They are silent on who receives it, on how it was generated, and on whether the generating can continue.
And when you ask those instead, the picture inverts.