America was young once, and vibrant. We are now old and sick.
Compared to the old days, more of us are old, and more of us are dying young. The grim trajectory of our demography is laid out by scholar Lyman Stone in a new study, “Red, White, and Gray,” published by the American Enterprise Institute.
Over the past century, Americans’ average age has increased from 25 years old to nearly 40, Stone reports. Much of this is improved medicine, allowing us to live longer. A country where more people live to be 80 is a country where the average age will be higher. But it’s not quite true that we’re living longer.
Life spans in America have been shortening in recent years. “The odds that a 32-year-old will die in a given year,” Stone writes, “rose by almost 25 percent between 2012–14 and 2015–17. American adulthood has suddenly become more lethal than it has been in decades.”
We’ve had no war or meteor strike to cause this. Nobody’s even blaming it on climate change.
A major cause of the retreating life span, particularly among middle-aged men, has been the rise in deaths of despair. Suicides hit an all-time high last year. Drug overdose deaths have quadrupled in two decades.
Our culture, it seems, is lethal.
And so it’s no surprise we also have fewer babies than we used to. The average American woman has fewer babies each year. The total fertility rate in 2017 was 1.7655 babies per woman of childbearing age, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
This isn’t just about fewer babies per woman. It’s fewer babies total. About 3.788 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, marking the fourth straight year of decline and giving us the fewest bouncing bundles of joy since 1986.
Fewer babies, fewer families, and more death. America is not aging well.
