What does a resident of Calton in Glasgow have in common with the average American?
Neither is very healthy.
All over the world health, as measured by life expectancy, is improving. But, not improving as much in Glasgow, especially not in Calton, a poorer part of the city; nor among middle-aged Americans, especially not among people of low education.
When, in 2015, Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science it generated the expected press interest. When, a few weeks later, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, both Princeton economists, published a paper on trends in mortality in the US it generated ten times the press interest. What the paper showed was truly shocking. Case and Deaton examined trends in mortality rates in men and women, aged 45 to 54, from 1990 to 2012. Rates were coming down in France, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia and Sweden; as they were in US Hispanics. But in non-Hispanic whites, rates were rising. The fewer the years spent in education the steeper the rise. The social gradient in mortality was getting steeper.