- David Wallace-Wells: why do Americans suffer so many “needless deaths” than other nations?;
- Why groceries are expensive is not an American issue;
- How some Trump-loving congregants deride Jesus’ teachings as “weak”.
- And Hans Zimmer’s “Journey to the Line,” from THE THIN RED LINE, perhaps my favorite movie score of all time.
NY Times, David Wallace-Wells (subscriber-only newsletter), 9 Aug 2023: Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?
On the continuing theme of how the US is not the greatest nation on Earth, as the MAGA folks believe, on most measures of societal health.
Here is the issue of “needless deaths,” driven up in America by rejection of the Covid vaccines. There were debates and disputes about the number of deaths actually due to Covid, but a look at the typical number of deaths each year before Covid and after Covid showed that, if anything, Covid deaths were likely under-counted. This piece begins:
Death is excessive in America, and the more you look the more distressing the picture seems.
You’ve probably heard about the mortality crisis in terms of its effect on average life spans — several years ago, after decades of steady improvements, life expectancy in the United States took an unprecedented turn for the worse, placing it not among its wealthy peers, but below Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka and Algeria (and just ahead of Panama, Turkey and Lebanon). And while the trend is clear, the change may seem small, because the impact is averaged over the country as a whole. American life expectancy dropped just 0.1 year between 2014 and 2019, before Covid.
But the loss is jaw-dropping by another measure — the sheer number of needless deaths. Before the pandemic, roughly a half million more people in America died each year than would have died, on average, in wealthy peer countries. In each of the first two years of the pandemic, the number surpassed one million.
The article then traces the history of health trends in the US and other countries after WWII and especially since the mid-1980s.
According to life expectancy research by Jessica Ho of the University of Southern California, among 18 high-income countries, the United States has fallen from middle of the pack in 1980 to dead last. By just the year 2000, Bor and his colleagues discovered, about 400,000 Americans were dying each year above the number projected by peer countries’ mortality rates. By 2010, it was an extra nearly 500,000 deaths. In 2019, it was 622,000.
And that was before the pandemic.
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Paul Krugman, NYT subscriber-only newsletter, 8 Aug 2023: Why Are Groceries So Expensive?
Reasons for things like this are always much more complex than partisans think.
Sometimes I talk about inflation with real people — no, not Trump supporters in diners, but people who don’t pore over Bureau of Labor Statistics reports or argue about the relative merits of trimmed mean versus multivariate core trend inflation. And while people don’t necessarily disagree with the proposition that inflation is coming down, they do inevitably bring up the cost of groceries.
It’s a fair point. Yes, there’s a negativity bias in perceptions of food inflation, in which big jumps make a stronger impression than big declines. For example, the Eggpocalypse of 2022 got a lot more attention than the rapid normalization of 2023:
Here’s yet another of those biases, one that affects everyone, but especially conservatives, who think cleanly in black and white terms. Bad news gets lots of attention, when enemies can be blamed; good news is taken for granted, lest enemies be credited.
Why? Can we blame Bidenomics? Or are surging food prices an example of “greedflation,” inflation caused by price gouging?
No and no. OK, the economic surge under Biden may have had some marginal impact on food prices, especially because it has led to big wage gains for low-paid workers, including workers at supermarkets. And I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some big players in the food business have taken advantage of general inflation to exploit their market power even more than usual. But the key point to understand about food inflation is that it’s a global phenomenon, outside the control of any one government (except, in a sense, Russia’s — I’ll get there in a minute) and transcending the pricing policies of even the biggest businesses.
This is a key point that the conservative critics ignore — perhaps misunderstand, but more likely simply ignore to play to their simple-minded base — that problems affecting America are affecting the whole world, and can’t be Biden’s fault.
… Last but not least, a series of extreme weather events, made much more likely by climate change, has disrupted agricultural production in many places.
The bottom line is that even though many people would like someone to blame for high grocery prices, it’s really hard to find domestic villains. Despite what the American right claims, Joe Biden didn’t do this. Despite what some on the left would like to believe, neither, at least for the most part, did greedy corporations.
Sometimes, as the bumper stickers don’t quite say, stuff just happens.
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I’ve long thought that most “Christians” are driven by Savannah/tribal morality rather than by the teachings of Jesus. And so this piece caught my eye. They love Trump more than Jesus.
MSN, from Raw Story, Brad Reed, 9 Aug 2023: Pastor alarmed after Trump-loving congregants deride Jesus’ teachings as ‘weak’
Evangelical Christian leader Russell Moore revealed this week that many evangelical pastors have become alarmed that their Trump-loving congregants have become so militant that they are even rejecting the teachings of Jesus Christ.
In an interview with NPR, Moore said that multiple pastors had told him disturbing stories about their congregants being upset when they read from the famous “Sermon on the Mount” in which Christ espoused the principles of forgiveness and mercy as central to Christian doctrine.
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?'” Moore revealed. “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.'”
Jesus, as I understand his teachings, was actually trying to move humanity beyond the tribal morality of the Savannah — tribe against tribe, ingroups vs outgroups — to help others outside one’s community. But modern conservatives seem beholden to tribal morality. How do they reconcile their allegiance to Jesus and the Bible? I keep struggling to work this out. (Provisional conclusion: most adherents don’t actually read the Bible, but since it’s the most ancient and widespread text available, it’s the rock they ground themselves on.)
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The key track, I think, of my favorite movie score of all time: Hans Zimmer’s THE THIN RED LINE, from 1998. It’s slow and steady and meditative, until it bursts out.
