This article from something called the Institute for New Economic Thinking has some depressing info (not many stats though) on U.S. life expectancy. I’ve had this feeling for a few years now, that the U.S. is not only not the leader of the pack when it comes to developed nations, we are not even solidly in the middle of the pack, and we are slipping to developing country status on many indicators. But even saying that is not entirely fair to developing countries, because they are making gains on many quality of life measures out of proportion to their income levels, while we are losing quality of life in spite of our nominally growing economy.

That’s what public health researcher Steven H. Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has documented. By 2019, just before COVID‑19 hit, U.S. life expectancy ranked 40th among the world’s most populous countries, trailing places like Albania and Lebanon. The pandemic only made things worse: by 2020, the U.S. had fallen to 46th, as six more nations overtook it.

Woolf hasn’t just compared the U.S. to wealthy countries like Canada, Germany, or the U.K. He looked at life expectancy across dozens of nations with very different histories and economies, and the results are startling. The U.S. began falling behind as early as the 1950s, with countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East steadily overtaking it.

The reasons are not really secret: our lack of a universal health care system, our food system and lack of physical activity, our motor vehicle dominated lives, and our unusual level of deadly violence. There are many examples of effective policies to address these issues if our leaders choose to look to other developed and middle income countries, and even to pockets of sanity in some U.S. states and cities.