Until recently, the most obvious demographic trend has been the “squaring of the curve”: more people were hitting an apparently natural limit in their eighties and nineties, rather than dying off in their forties, fifties, and sixties.
Now, however, longevity stats are showing a new feature. A graph in a fascinating article puts it like this: “Americans die earlier than the English across the income distribution, despite typically earning significantly more,” with the article quickly clarifying the specifics: “America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young.”
The most vulnerable members of traditional society are newborns and the aged. But now it’s those reaching their alleged prime: “one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday.”
Is it COVID? No. This trend is older than 2020, and remember, in the recent pandemic it was the aged, not the young, who experienced higher rates of morality.
An article by Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt suggests that the problem may loom beyond America, for their work shows that “The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Is International,” and I don’t think it is at all out of bounds to take higher youth rates of suicidality, desperate recreational drug use, and expressed anxiety and despair — and skyrocketing transgender rates, too — as stressors related to increased death rates.
It is vital to study these things, for their main conclusion is startling and a general sign of deep cultural decay: “Teen mental health plummeted across the Western world in the early 2010s, particularly for girls and particularly in the most individualistic nations.”
We should ask ourselves: could this be related to the rise of a gerontocracy?
A society run by old people for old people may have nasty inter-generational side effects.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
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3 replies on “Down-Shifted Demographics”
Underlying depression is an inculcated sense that one lacks control over matters about which one cares deeply.
Many people are going to rush-ahead on the presumption that the inculcation necessarily means that one is denied outcomes that one wants; but that presumption is false. The problem is lack of control. A child who almost never can get the outcomes that she wants, no matter what she does, will indeed have that sense inculcated; but so will a child who almost always gets the outcomes he wants, no matter what he does. Neither child is controlling his or her outcomes.
Perhaps younger people see the future disappearing, as it is being eaten by older people; certainly this is a dire outcome over which younger people have little control. But the mainstream of the media and the school system haven’t been giving them messages about that general problem. Instead, younger people are fearful about the future because they are told that the Science™ is that anthropogenic global climate change is going to cause the Earth to become a Hellscape.
Meanwhile, children of color are told that white people are in control, and racist to the last man, woman, and babe, so that people of color simply will not get what they deserve, despite their very best efforts. White children are told that they are born racist and privileged, and don’t deserve as much as they have, whatever that might be, and however much they might themselves have worked to get it. Boys are told that they get too much, even as their average outcomes have become far worse than those of girls; girls are told that they are and may expect to be always given too little.
Competitions are replaced by events with participation awards. Students in some schools are promoted without completing assignments, passing tests, or even attending classes.
Our children increasingly feel that they do not have and will not have any control over the outcomes in their lives.
It could also be due to the modern day press incessantly predicting the “end of the world” because of climate change, their drumbeat of always publishing the bad news instead of any good news (of which there is plenty), and the constant blaming of present day civilization for the sins of the past. No wonder youth suicide is rampant.
The early 2010’s? Could it be that young people today being brought up in the age of social media and i‑phones have no real interactions with other people? Between hash tags and Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, when and where do they form relationships? Instead they lock on to the latest trend, determined to be part of the in crowd.
Don’t forget also that President Barack Obama set out to ‘transform’ America. Look at the CRT itinerary.
It’s not all the fault of the gerontocracy. Young people vote for them, too. How many supported Bernie Sanders? Look at the Squad. Young people determined to prove America is a racist, awful place and they sit in the US House of Representatives..