Did you know that Americans get sicker and stupid on average every year? Ok, that’s what it says obvious, but did you know that this trend suddenly started around 1947?
In the latest edition of the American Economic Review, Nicholas Reynolds Doctors a surprising change in trends in the American population in important indicators for health and human capital. The graphs below illustrate six important variables and their trends around 1947.
Panel A shows the average hourly wage of men per cohort. Starting after the Second World War, the average hourly wage of work was adjusted for their age. In the meantime, the average number of years of training remained around the same time (Panel E), while women’s years of education (Panel F) continued to increase.
On the health side, the death rates suddenly started to rise again after the Second World War and they only returned to earlier falling trends in the mid -sixties (Panels C and D).
Age Corrected result by Birth Cohort
Source: Reynolds (2025)
So yes, compared to their grandparents at the same age, today’s baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1965) are not much better educated and not so much healthier, but certainly earn less money when they are adapted for inflation. And that is just the baby boom sergeneration.
What has these special shifts caused? Reynolds suggests two possible explanations, both of which require more research to be confirmed.
The first theory is because there were more of them, Baby Boomer children suffered from more intense competition for resources. Classrooms in schools were larger and doctors had to deal with more patients, which reduced the quality of education and health care that baby boomers received.
The second theory is the environment. After the Second World War, cars were really ubiquitous on American roads. Until the 1970s, however, these cars ran on fuel that contained lead, a substance that is now known as harmful to the brain development of children and young adults, and generally harmful to health. It’s so bad that there is a case to make that The person who invented main fuel additives may have killed more people on the planet than any other person.
In particular, the renewed improvement of the health results for people born after 1960, as shown in the above graphs, indicates that removing lead from the air might have been one of the best things we’ve ever done.
#Sicker #stupid