I’m not sure my side of the Atlantic fully understands how much better the average American lives than the average European. A car wash manager in Alabama can now earn $125,000, which is about 50% more than the head of cyber security at the UK Treasury, even taking into account the different costs of living. This is not just another reflection of the stagnant U.K. economy – over the past decade, up from the middle of the income distribution, U.S. households have led every country in the developed world.
As you can imagine, this continued growth in spending power is likely to be accompanied by improvements in other indicators of prosperity. Longer lives and healthier lives, for example. But these two trends are moving in opposite directions.
The United States’ poor record on life expectancy is nothing new. For much of the past decade, Americans have been living shorter and shorter lives compared to other countries. But beneath the surface, there are some striking details that require our attention and urgent efforts to reverse this trend.
American life expectancy compares extremely unfavorably with that of the United Kingdom. For much of the past decade, the English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline. It has the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescriptions in England. But as of 2019, the health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 years (the number of years a person is expected to live without a disability) is the same as the average life expectancy for the entire United States.
This means the average American has the same chance of living a long and healthy life as someone born in the poorest town in England. If you then examine how life expectancy varies by income distribution between the two countries, the results are not good. This is particularly worrying when you consider that the UK is far from top-notch in terms of life expectancy in Europe.
While life expectancy is similar for Americans and Brits living in the most affluent neighborhoods of their respective countries, it is a different story at the bottom. People born in the most deprived areas of Blackpool are expected to live five years longer than those in the poorest parts of the United States.
That’s abhorrent enough, but we haven’t taken into account the fact that the richest Americans are much richer than their British counterparts. Once we do, the UK will stand out at every income level. The average life expectancy of someone with a net household income of around £65,000 or $100,000 is 85 years in the UK, compared to 80 years in the US.
What accounts for these disparities? Alarmingly, the mortality problem in the United States is largely caused by the deaths of young people.
One statistic stands out: Today, one in 25 American children aged 5 will not live past their 40th birthday. No parent should have to bury their child, but a group of parents in every kindergarten class in the United States is likely to do so.
This is a very American problem. The vast majority of these young people’s deaths are caused by external causes – drug overdoses, gun violence, dangerous driving, etc. – that are deeply rooted social problems involving groups with opposing interests. They are much trickier to solve than most health problems in which everyone is working in one direction.
During the pandemic, nearly every country in the world was struck by death. Most developed countries are bouncing back, but not the United States. If Covid-19 had never happened, life expectancy in other developed countries would have remained the same or increased, but the U.S. would still be down a year due to a surge in violent deaths. By my calculations, in 2021 alone, Americans will have lost 9.4 million years of life due to external causes, more than the 9.1 million years lost to the new coronavirus throughout the pandemic. These deaths continue to rise.
The past three years have stretched social ties and tested safety nets everywhere, which the U.S. was found to lack. But underlying factors reveal a long-term story of hidden costs to life expectancy across income groups. It is among the young, the poor and the vulnerable that avoidable deaths pay the highest price.
