[marginalium]
The Economics Of Despair
28 Mar 2025
Article on the health cost of the current economic malaise. US-centric, so you’d have to modify by satisfaction when doing the hypothetical in your own country. Feels like the UK might be doing worse, to me. Horrible time here:
a significant increase in mortality among middle aged white men and women — an increase concentrated amongst lower income, working class Americans.[ii] Case and Deaton trace the proximate causes of death driving this increase to suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Measures of self-assessed health status they examined in surveys over 2011-2013 compared to 1997-1999 also show increased reports of pain and psychological distress.
And, the comparison case:
These results bear a striking resemblance to another demographic crisis: Though we are used to thinking of the Cold War as an economic and political contest without casualties the fall of the Berlin Wall showed us that when economic systems and expectations collapse, people die just a surely as they do in a shooting war. In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fell dramatically.
Worth being rich.
Anthologies: Betterment, Somatic Architecture, Wealth Architecture, On (Un)happiness, On Culture, On Ethics, On Politics and Power, Accidental Civilisation, Absit Omnia