The American way of death

Derek Thompson points out that, if the key test of a civilization is how well it does at keeping its own citizens alive, America is a failing project in comparison to its supposed peers:

 The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

This extra cash ought to buy us more years of living. For most countries, higher incomes translate automatically into longer lives. But not for today’s Americans. A new analysis by John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist at the Financial Times, shows that the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

Imagine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

According to data collected by Burn-Murdoch, a typical American baby is about 1.8 times more likely to die in her first year than the average infant from a group of similarly rich countries: Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Let’s think of this 1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”-the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations. In direct country-to-country comparisons, the ratio is even higher. The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia. Only in our late 80s and 90s are Americans statistically on par, or even slightly better off, than residents of other rich nations.

The culprits here are well known:

(1) Guns

(2) Drugs, specifically opioids.

(3) Cars

(4) A dysfunctional wildly inefficient health care system (We pay far more than any other nation for much worse results).

(5) Extremely high levels of income inequality, combined with an absurdly inadequate social safety net for the poor.

The US response to the Covid pandemic is symptomatic of these broader pathologies: The nation’s total of 3,462 deaths per one million people (so far) is worse than that of any other rich country, including countries with significantly older populations that should have, all other things being equal, had significantly higher death rates from Covid than the USA. This is even more striking, given that Americans had general access to the Covid vaccines earlier than almost any other people.

All these statistics speak to a long term national decline that is creating a kind of late Roman empire feel, in a country that continues to think of itself as exceptional, and is increasingly correct about that for all the wrong reasons.