From ill health to alcoholism to suicides, the links between deprivation and reduced life expectancy are becoming clear
On the face of it, it is a familiar enough story. “By its end, much of the optimism of the 20th century had faded. Towns and cities … that used to produce steel, glass, furniture or shoes, and that are fondly remembered by people in their 70s as having been great places to grow up, had been gutted, their factories closed and shops boarded up.”
The words are taken from a remarkable new book by the academics Anne Case and Angus Deaton. On the face of it, this passage perhaps suggests one of those cliched accounts of what sits behind the growth of populism. But rather than framing the condition we now know as “left behind” as a matter of political preferences, the cheerily titled Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism sees it in terms of stark matters such as illness, addiction and rising mortality rates among white Americans aged between 45 and 54, which the book links to “suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholic liver disease”. Between 2014 and 2017, these factors contributed to the first decline in average American life expectancy since records began in 1933.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
