US has tensions (lack of broad social agreement) in its regard for several subjects, so those areas absorb infinite money as the incoherent regulations and rent seeking around those black holes festers. Housing, Medicine, Education, Justice/Policing/Prison system. Denial of reality is always expensive. If you ask the median voter questions about any of these areas it is certain that there will be many basic misunderstandings about them.
We have eliminated the ability to discriminate against those displaying anti-social behaviors or commons damaging externalities in the name of fairness, leaving monetary discrimination the only remaining legally viable recourse and are destroying every other form of commons.
Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it. But yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than us.
You're still focusing on averages, which is the error inherent in the myth.
While it's true that average life expectancy has increased, the point is that it was absolutely routine for people to live into their 60s, and not uncommon for them to live into their 70s or 80s.
The average still means something. Yes a lot of people were living to 60s, 70s or 80s, but way more people than today were dying at a younger age because of a disease that can now be cured, hygiene not as good, etc.
> Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it.
No, people who say that they “died extremely early relative to modern humans” mean the bunk dying at 40 due to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.
Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1] The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called “appeal to ancestry fallacy”. That we know medicine now (like hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.
If you buy things that are productive you come out ahead on a trade deficit. If you buy things that are consumptive you are pawning future productive capacity of the country. Every country does both, obviously, what matters is the overall balance. The US has notably (as in quantified by economists, civil engineers, people who study urban planning etc.) failed to invest in productive infra for quite a while now.
