US Wealth Distribution

This is both absurd and morally repugnant.  How can a society claim to value all people equally yet tolerate such disparity in wealth and the power and influence that wealth brings?

If one does the math, 10% of the households in the US control almost 70% of the wealth of the nation.  What are some of the implications of this gap?  Well, the following Brookings Institution paper builds a case that lifespans are closely linked to college degrees in the US, where the inequality that the rest of the world is worried about is exploding in real time.

Accounting for the widening mortality gap between American adults with and without a BA

By Anne Case and  Angus Deaton

Sep 27, 2023

The widening gap in death rates between Americans with and without a four-year college degree shows the U.S. economy is failing working-class people, suggests a paper to be discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 28.

The U.S. economy, as measured by conventional metrics such as growth in gross domestic product (GDP), has recently outperformed other advanced economies. But mortality data paint a different picture, according to "Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA."

"GDP may be doing great, but people are dying in increasing numbers, especially less-educated people," Anne Case, one of the authors, said in an interview with The Brookings Institution. "A lot of the increasing prosperity is going to the well-educated elites. It is not going to typical working people."

She and co-author Angus Deaton, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, both of Princeton University, analyzed U.S. death certificate information, including the age of death, cause of death, and educational attainment. They found that life expectancy for the college-educated in 2021 was eight-and-a-half years longer than for the two-thirds of American adults without a bachelor's degree. That's more than triple the 1992 gap of about two-and-a-half years.

From 1992 to 2010, both educational groups saw increasing life expectancy but with a greater improvement for people with college degrees. From 2010 to 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy rose for people with a four-year degree but stalled and then declined for people without one. And from 2019 to 2021, life expectancy fell for both groups, but much more rapidly for people with less education.

Consequently, the mortality gap between the two groups widened in all three periods, the paper notes. Life expectancy for the college-educated, despite the decline during the pandemic, was still better in 2021 than in 1992. But life expectancy for the less-educated was worse.

"The U.S. appears to be the only Western country where life expectancies are trending in different directions" for the more- and less-educated, the authors write.

"All summer there have been news articles about how well the U.S. economy is doing relative to Europe and we've been patting ourselves on the back," Deaton said in an interview. "But if you instead ask how the people are doing, our life expectancy is among the worst."

The paper builds on the authors' 2020 book, "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism," which sounded an alarm about the dramatic rise in deaths among working-class people from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism.

Deaths of despair were the leading driver of the widening mortality gap over the past 30 years, but the gap also widened for most other major causes of death, the paper notes. Cancer mortality, for instance, has declined overall but it has declined more for people with college degrees.

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