Killing us not so softly

So “we’re” not in a recession, I’m told. Maybe the NPR announcers and Yale economists aren’t in a recession, but a lot of the rest of us are. Some of us have been in a recession for decades.

Grim evidence of this came for me this weekend in the New York Times, which reported on new research that finds that, for in many parts of the country, and especially for women, life expectancy has actually been falling for the last thirty years. As the article noted, this is almost unheard of in an industrialized nation, and reverses what had been “an American birthright” that each generation would live longer than the last.

If this news came from some other country, there would be much cluck-clucking among the U.S.’ chattering classes. Declining longevity is a sign that things have gone drastically wrong in a society. It is usually seen in countries riven by civil war or economic collapse—think Russia after the collapse of communism, Argentina after its World Bank–aided economic meltdown, Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s disastrous ouster of farmers, or Iraq after the U.S. invasion. And when whole portions of a country start living less long than others, you’ve got a society pulling apart at the seams.

There is no longer a single “we,” but indeed two—or more—Americas. No wonder news anchors can find it credible to report that we’re not in a recession—what do they know of the Southwest Virginia counties where women can now expect to live six years less than they did 16 years ago?

Even in its admirable reporting on this, the New York Times betrays its class-inflected blindness. “A pair of reports out this month affirm that the rising tide of American health is not lifting all boats”—plenty of American have never seen any such rising tide of health, only a rising tide of medical bills.

The Times article didn’t offer much insight into why women are doing so badly. It did mention that smoking peaked later among women than men. What else? I speculate that it has something to do with the fact that women have been bearing the weight of America’s failure to come to terms with the transformation of the family. Women are shouldering largely unaided the burden of raising children and all the stress that comes with it, without either social supports or the support of traditional family structures. Think long work hours, low wages, lack of healthcare, and high childcare costs for often inadequate or crummy care (and meanwhile we get blamed for it all). Just thinking about it shaves a few years off my life.