In the decades since total Soviet collapse brought the Cold War to an end, US power and wealth have been unparalleled—arguably historically unique. Yet all is not well at home. For the American population, social wellbeing has faltered, even as the USA enjoyed “unipolar” supremacy in the international arena.
In a previous post, we looked at the USA’s halting progress in wealth-building for ordinary Americans in the Post–Cold War era. In this post we look at health trends in America since the end of the Cold War.
We use mortality trends to illuminate basic survival prospects, drawing on the Human Mortality Database (HMD), the superb project that has painstakingly produced a time series of detailed actuarial “life tables” for the USA and dozens of other countries.
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