Lone Candle
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Millennials & Gen-Z are Poorer Than Ever (Here’s Why) Humphrey Yang. 2023 5 17. Have the Boomers Pinched Their Children’s Futures? – with Lord David Willetts The Royal Institution. 2020 1 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A Some numbers at beginning for UK and Europe. The
US fertility rate drops to lowest in 100 years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FrV7i0_Ma0
“A new study out of Finland reaffirms this general rule in a very specific way. The Finnish government randomly awarded work subsidies to men and women. The finding is a bit awkward in these days of gender equity: If you subsidize work for men, birthrates go up. If you subsidize work for women, birthrates go down.”
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/awkward-truth-subsidizing-womens-work-drives-down-birthrates/
“the CCP has recently adopted policies intended to encourage the young generation to have more children. However it’s proving much more difficult to achieve this than it was to bully people to have less. A measure of Xi’s desperation is his de facto order last May that China’s 2 million military personnel must take part. The rest of the population are unimpressed by the various material incentives to increased fertility.
Like it or not, following Xi’s prolonged, ineffective Zero Covid lockdown the young people of China are increasingly inclined to passive resistance to the Party’s transactional interference in their private lives. Since the pandemic hit, Chinese social media have been full of nihilistic, disaffected exchanges between young people about the gap behind Xi’s fabricated ‘China Dream’ and their own hopeless existence. No amount of state censorship has stifled this.
The realities are stark. Last year, 11.6 bn Chinese graduates tried to enter the workforce. One in five is likely to remain unemployed. Others who did find work are victims to an obsolete ethic of unrewarded hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and abandon vain hopes of career advancement, an approach known as “lying flat”. Xi has singled this idea out for strong criticism but has nothing to offer in return. Worse still, in one speech he told the young five times to toughen up and learn to “eat bitterness”. They are not the least impressed by his exhortation to ‘seek self-inflicted hardships’ in the new economic normal.
Increasingly, Chinese people realise that their leaders have abandoned all pretence of a reliable social contract in justification for single-party rule. Neither they, nor the free citizens of Taiwan, have the least faith in talk of China’s “glorious rejuvenation”.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-population-time-bomb-explode-080000262.html
“So why did U.S. life expectancy trends slow and then peak in 2014? And what, if anything, can policy makers and politicians realistically do to make increasing it a priority? As noted above, the big recent dip largely resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2023 Scientific Reports article “estimated that US life expectancy at birth dropped by 3.08 years due to the million COVID-19 deaths” between February 2020 and May 2022. But let’s set aside that steep post-2020 downtick in life expectancy resulting from nearly 1.2 million Americans dying of COVID-19 infections.
A 2020 study in Health Affairs chiefly attributed the 3.3-year increase in U.S. life expectancy between 1990 and 2015 to public health, better pharmaceuticals, and improvements in medical care. By public health, the authors meant such things as campaigns to reduce smoking, increase cancer screenings and seat belt usage, improve auto and traffic safety, and increase awareness of the danger of stomach sleep for infants. With respect to pharmaceuticals, they cited the significant reduction in cardiovascular diseases that resulted from the introduction of effective drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.
So a big part of what propelled increases in U.S. life expectancy is the fact that the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen from 43 percent in the 1970s to 16 percent now. Smoking is associated with higher risks of cardiovascular diseases and cancers, rates of which have been dropping for decades. In addition, the rising percentage of Americans who are college graduates correlated with increasing life expectancy.
However, since the 2004 peak, countervailing increases in the death rates from drug overdoses, firearms, traffic accidents, and diseases associated with obesity contributed to the flattening of U.S. life expectancy trends.
A 2021 comprehensive analysis of the recent stagnation and decline in U.S. life expectancy in the Annual Review of Public Health (ARPH) largely concurs, finding that “the proximate causes of the decline are increases in opioid overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and Alzheimer’s disease.” Interestingly, the U.S. trend in Alzheimer’s disease prevalence has been downward since 2011. In addition, the ARPH review noted that “a slowdown in the long-term decline in mortality from cardiovascular diseases has also prevented life expectancy from improving further.” So enabling and persuading more properly diagnosed Americans to take blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medications would likely boost overall life expectancy.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/08/guns-germs-and-drugs-are-largely-responsible-for-the-decline-in-u-s-life-expectancy/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9LZBjWzF4g