The “glass ceiling” of old age and poor health.
Expected lifespans are plateauing worldwide, suggesting that life-extending advances in medicine, food safety, and plumbing may have gone as far as they can to preserve humanity’s ability to prolong the inevitable. This news dampens techno-mystical fantasies of using science to achieve immortality and slip the surly bonds of death. Yet this is old news for Americans, whose lifespans began to decline before the rest of the world and before the pandemic.
Social Justice Die-off?
Such issues are complex and subject to politicization. Disparities in black or Native American populations are instantly highlighted as “inequitable” while the long-observed disparity between men and women is not – women have always lived longer than men on average, and it is not credibly…
