Social inequality is one of the greatest predictors of well-being on a society wide scale. At a certain point, a country getting richer has no real effect on the quality and longevity of life of its citizens. How that wealth is distributed becomes determinant, with even very rich societies having poor outcomes as the negatives of high inequality outweigh the benefits of that wealth. Conversely, much poorer countries can do much better than one would expect when wealth is more equitably distributed. People are happier, less jealous/anxious, find it easier to relate to one another, have more equitable institutions of medicine/school/work, so on and so forth. All the things we communists think are good in of themselves are actually instrumentally good too. In a strictly utilitarian sense, increasing equality makes most people (even the relatively rich!) better off. It's a no brainer to anyone with a brain.
"The Spirit Level" and "The Inner Level" written by Wilkensen and Pickett cover this very well. Highly recommend it for further reading and theory ammunition in debates with baffled libs.
Ah, fudge. I've had The Spirit Level sitting unread on my bookshelf for over a year now. I'll read it, I'll read it!
At this point it's a bit dated as far as its findings are concerned. The good news is they're right! The bad news is... Fuck they're right.... And it's only gotten worse since.
Fireball whiskey has anti-freeze in it and is consumed by a significant portion of the American population before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed.
On a slightly more serious note, some time in the future psychologists and anthropologists will study the history of the American populace and almost certainly find out that the inability of life expectancy to keep up with comparable countries is due to the fact that an appallingly large percentage Americans can’t afford to do anything or go anywhere for leisure.
Americans are going to eventually end up like those completely healthy lab rats whose life expectancy is like 50% that of the control group simply because the American rats have no enrichment in their enclosures.
Closest thing I've had to a vacation in like a decade was trimming weed on a friend's farm.
Most Americans can’t even have that experience. There’s like… a whole genre of video games where you get to trim weeds on a farm
Know a guy that has almost all of those simulators. Dude ravaged his siding with an actual pressure washer though.
Technically yes; it’s propylene glycol. It’s more heavily regulated in Europe than it is in America (of course, hence my making it a point in this thread) and it is supposedly safe to consume in limited amounts. The problem remains though, is it safe to consume Fireball whiskey AND propylene glycol simultaneously in limited amounts? Personally, I’m not going to push my luck.
Here’s an article covering when it began to be removed from European shelves back in 2014.
The FDA allows about 50 grams per kilogram of propylene glycol in foods.
That's a lot... I'm in constant awe about the lax regulations in the US
Thanks for the link!
Well, I hope it’s reassuring to you that the current legislation in the US regulating Propylene Glycol in food and beverage was written in 1982.
(d) The ingredient is used in foods at levels not to exceed current good manufacturing practice in accordance with § 184.1(b)(1). Current good manufacturing practice results in maximum levels, as served, of 5 percent for alcoholic beverages, as defined in § 170.3(n)(2) of this chapter; 24 percent for confections and frostings as defined in § 170.3(n)(9) of this chapter; 2.5 percent for frozen dairy products as defined in § 170.3(n)(20) of this chapter; 97 percent for seasonings and flavorings as defined in § 170.3(n)(26) of this chapter; 5 percent for nuts and nut products as defined in § 170.3(n)(32) of this chapter; and 2.0 percent for all other food categories.
[47 FR 27812, June 25, 1982]
Here’s a link to all official regulation regarding propylene glycol, careful though, it’s pretty thorough. It’s an entire one half of one page.
At least it seems somewhat safe to consume based on what I read so far?
It's interesting that it's not used in Europe so, seemingly only in cosmetics and vapes/regular cigarettes
Anti-freeze is typically ethylene glycol, vs propylene glycol that is considered less or non-toxic… interestingly an antidote to ethylene glycol poisoning is ethanol… although my understanding is that it often isn’t enough to save a persom from some of the worst effects of antifreeze poisoning… often times drunken suicide attempts with antifreeze end up not working because the antidote has been delivered already, but it often prolongs some of the agonizing pain and still endangers their lives… without gastric levage and hemodialysis they can end up dying long agonizing deaths
Why Not Check Out US YOUTH EXPERIENCE? We Have:
- Getting crushed by your parents' pick-up truck in your own driveway
- Bleeding out in an alleyway after a botched makeshift abortion
- Being shot 20 times for reaching into your pocket after police asks for your passport
- Getting shot by fascist lunatics at school
- Getting shot by fascist lunatics at holiday parades
- Getting shot by fascist lunatics at bars
COME ON BY, WE HAVE IT ALL
Being shot 20 times for reaching into your pocket after police asks for your passport
Police don't ask for passports here because we're too broke to afford international travel.
Revolution Road was a warning, and not just because it had Leonardo DeCaprio as a sex pest.
The average american's healthy life expectancy being equal to the one in the most impovrished Engish region is an insane statistic.
It's honestly quite a flex from the NHS
Even their worst off can out live middle class Americans
Probably won't be much of a gap with the way the UK is heading
I got a landscaping job where the guy training me was a decade-long employee. He worked with extremely dangerous chemicals in a cramped van. On the first day we passed a group with Medicare 4 All signs on the side of the road and he enthusiastically supported it because he couldn't afford to be seen by a doctor with the health insurance and wage that company paid someone working there for 10 years.
As soon as the training period was over and they expected me to do full work duties, I immediately quit without notice.
The result is that the US is the only developed country where even if you strip out all Covid deaths, life expectancy still dropped by a year since 2019
I think that's partly a larger systemic undercounting of covid deaths in America.
Reddit comment...
I make a good living but it's hard to get ahead. I hurt my knee a few years back and I need surgery. But I can't afford to drop a few grand that I might need for my kids, rent, car etc. And I can't take the time off work.
So my health has declined because of pain, financial stress, inability to work out the same way... etc.
So yeah my health has suffered and I've probably Shaved 2-3 years off my life span. If I had lower cost healthcare, more social safety net, and better job security... I would've fixed up my knee years ago and my quality of life would be up. Simple.
A lot of my peers in their 30s either don't have health insurance or can't afford the health insurance they do have. They're foregoing most or all preventive healthcare visits because it's too expensive. It's going to catch up with a lot of us in our 40s and 50s.
Not to mention that healthcare costs for our elderly parents will likely wring them of their entire net worth before they're allowed to die, so we don't have any kind of inheritance to look forward to either. The US health system is seriously fucked
The US has the world's highest public healthcare spending per capita and the world's second-highest private healthcare spending. In return they rank among mid-income countries when it comes to things like longevity and infant mortality.
Americans are being ripped off.
I was thinking about this the other day.
The way a lot of middle class kids stay middle class or even move up is by getting a nice inheritance from their parents. But with the cost of healthcare and just like nursing homes and shit is gonna eat that all up and a ton of people are gonna be getting nothing and subsequently become downwardly mobile
the latest horror is medicaid estate recovery, where people who have nothing but their house die and their kids get nothing because the state repossesses it to "pay for" coverage. so health benefits are now a loan apparently
the recent chapo with Libby Watson goes into detail
It looks like it's guns and cars and other external forces at work according to the thread, surprisingly
In the last graphs where they “magic” that stuff away there’s still a huge gap… like 50% of it
Healthcare still plays a huge role
This is a scary place to live. It's difficult to handle, be normal, maintain relationships, when all this swings over you. Damocles' situation but it's just me wanting to have an apartment
I was thinking it'd be clear cut on the side of healthcare, but it looks like I was reading it wrong anyways according to the other commenter
Guns, drugs, cars, lack of healthcare. Even wealth can't save your kid from death when they get hit by a giant consumer truck in your rich suburb.
Hey I'm no expert but could it have something to do with all the toxic chemicals and waste being spilled, exhausted, and intentionally disposed of in the air ground and water?
If you read the article it seems like its primarily driven by deaths of young people. 1 in 25 five year olds will not make it to their 40th birthday in America
average american is still better off than someone born in a 'Blackpool' whatever the hell that is :freedom-and-democracy:
Just think. You could be living in some resource rich global south country that we are bombing
Haha it's a beach town. It's where rock is from. You go there once a year, visit beach, become a bit gammon coloured, waste money in some penny arcades and amusements, go up a tower, ride an old wooden rollercoaster and buy some blackpool rock.
It's fallen off so it's not really a once a year thing for most people but most people in Britain has probably had this experience at least once. Big Dipper is old as fuck now, built in 1923.
I'm sorry, are those concrete stairs leading down into the ocean waves? No wonder so many Brits sound like they've got a concussion!
take a trip to hawaii, americans are making their best efforts
just above it is Fleetwood , where "Fishermans Friend" is produced , which germany is the biggest Market for and if its to hard for you you're to weak...
I grew up in the north west of England I have been to Blackpool probably 50 times lol. You forgot to mention the illuminations, a very weird tradition.
I heard they stopped the donkey rides. SMH cancel culture strike again.
Hey now don't forget the double-decker trams! Blackpool has England's only surviving pre-wwII tram system.
A head's up about the archive.today link. The site has a rare error. It fails to remove the javascript and the iframes. What does that mean? There's all sorts of crap on the page but if you right-click and go into the source code and remove that stuff - it regenerates!
archive.today • Why are Americans dying so young? | Financial Times
I’m not sure people on my side of the Atlantic fully appreciate quite how much better off the average American is than the average European. A car-wash manager in Alabama can now earn $125,000, about 50 per cent more than the head of cyber security at the UK Treasury even after accounting for different living costs. And this isn’t just another reflection of British stagnation — from the middle of the income distribution upwards, US households have streaked ahead(opens a new window) of every country in the developed world over the past decade.
Such a sustained boom in spending power might, you would imagine, be accompanied by improvements in other indicators of prosperity. Longer and healthier lives, for example. But the two trends are moving in opposite directions.
That the US has a poor record on life expectancy is nothing new. For the best part of a decade, American lives have grown progressively shorter relative to peer countries. But beneath the surface, several striking details demand our attention and an urgent effort to reverse the trend.
American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy(opens a new window), highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.
Chart showing that the average American now has the same chance of a long and healthy life as someone born in Blackpool, the town with England’s lowest life expectancy
This means that the average American has the same chance of a long and healthy life as someone born in the most deprived town in England. If you then explore how life expectancy varies across the income distribution in both countries, the results are not pretty. This is especially alarming when you consider that the UK is far from top of the class when it comes to life expectancy in Europe.
While Americans and Britons living in the richest neighbourhoods of their respective countries have similar, high life expectancies, at the bottom end it’s a different story. People born in the very poorest pockets of Blackpool are expected to live fully five years more than the poorest in the US.
This would be damning enough, but we’ve not yet accounted for the fact that the richest Americans are so much richer than their British counterparts. Once we do, Britain pulls clear at every income level. Someone with a net household income of about £65,000 or $100,000 will live to an average age of 85 in England, but only 80 in the US.
Chart showing that Americans die earlier than the English across the income distribution, despite typically earning significantly more
What is causing these gaps? Shockingly, America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young.
One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will.
Chart showing that One in 25 American five-year-olds does not make it to their 40th birthday, whereas at older ages US outcomes are similar to peer countries
And this is a very American problem. These young deaths are caused overwhelmingly by external causes — overdoses, gun violence, dangerous driving and such — which are deeply embedded social problems involving groups with opposing interests. Far trickier to tackle than most health issues where everyone is pulling in one direction.
Almost every country in the world took a mortality hit during the pandemic. Developed nations for the most part are bouncing back(opens a new window), but the US is not. If Covid-19 had never happened, life expectancy in other developed countries would have remained flat or increased, but the US would still have lost a year due to the surge in violent deaths. By my calculations, Americans lost 9.4 million years of life to external causes in 2021 alone, more than the 9.1mn lost to Covid over the course of the entire pandemic. And these deaths continue to rise.
Chart showing that Covid hit life expectancy right across the world, but the US stands alone in having lost an extra year to non-Covid causes including opioids and violence
The past three years have stretched social ties and tested safety nets everywhere and the US has been found wanting. But the underlying factors reveal a longer-term story of a hidden cost in life expectancy across the income groups. And the highest price is being paid in avoidable deaths among the young, the poor and the vulnerable.
first prize, a week in Blackpool.
second prize, two weeks in Blackpool.
Shit, this isn't what I meant when I said "death to America!" :sicko-wistful:
This is why fascism is inevitable in the US, eventually people will reach a breaking point and reach for the only tool in the kit
Well, theoretically speaking it’s not inevitable because people still have not chosen sides and fascists aren’t out there feeding people. If the right people serve the underserved then any fascism or attempted fascism can be fought.
Now that’s where the doomer side of me comes in. I look and just cannot imagine a leftist movement in the US that’s strong enough.
Not by ourselves, FUCK no. The future of the people living in this cursed land depends on wether or not Americans can swallow their pride and accept help from outside. Our politicians rejecting the Belt and Road Initiative is exactly the problem I'm thinking of here. That attitude, the assumption that acting tough and doing it all ourselves will get us a medal or something... that'll kill us.
Brainworms are too deep, we lack the capacity for change. We can’t even get fucking democrats to agree on a public option lol
"We" includes yourself. If you already gave up, of course it's not going to happen.
looking forward to living a long life in abject poverty because pensions no longer exist
