
mylifeistrash
Luminary
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- Joined
- Dec 28, 2017
- Posts
- 14,885

Life expectancy for American men drops for a third year
Many men are dying earlier due to "deaths of despair" linked to drugs, suicide and ill health

Some comments I stole from hacker news:
"This drop is largely caused by deaths of despair [1], partly related to a lack of affordable health care in the US. The fact that (at least [2]) 78% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck [3] underscores the relative poverty many people experience in daily life. I think it is fair to say that a majority of Americans live with a scarcity mindset, likely affecting mental health negatively."
"This starts being pretty similar to what happened in the USSR immediately after the Perestroika failed, in a span of 10-years (1990-2000) life expectancy for men fell by 5 years (from 63 to 58).
That was a pretty big societal crisis which among other things helped bring to power an autocrat like Putin (and especially helped him stay there, as life expectancy shot up again starting with the early 2000s), I’m wondering when will the present situation in the States be treated like the real societal crisis that it represents? In other words, guys like Trump are not merely the causes for much that goes wrong in the States, they’re merely the effects, take him down and a new Trump-like character will probably emerge in his place, unless you fix the problem at its very roots."