Americans born after 1947 might be sicker, more likely to die and less affluent than comparable Americans born earlier were.
Nicholas Reynolds, a researcher at the University of Essex, makes the case for a broad decline in U.S. human capital in a paper published, behind a paywall, in the journal American Economic Review: Insights.
Reynolds started with U.S. government data files, such as Census Bureau data, then used math to make recent changes more clear by subtracting out long-term economic trends.
Most U.S. population well-being indicators Reynolds analyzed got worse for each "cohort," or group of people, born in years starting in 1948. The deterioration continued at least until the mid-1960s.
If the well-being of the U.S. population had not deteriorated, the median man born in 1960 would have a wage 23% higher than the actual figure, Reynolds wrote.
Over the period from 1975 through 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic came to light — the single-year mortality risk for Americans born in 1960 was about 1.5 times higher than it would have been if pre-1948 mortality improvement trends had continued, Reynolds said.
What it means: If Reynolds is correct, typical life insurance and annuity clients born after 1947 might tend to fall behind the financial, health and longevity benchmarks set by clients born earlier.
The paper: Amy Finkelstein, an MIT economist who has written many papers about life insurance and annuities, co-edited the paper.
An early "working paper" version of the paper is available in front of a paywall.
Paper details: Reynolds repeated the analyses with different assumptions and techniques and came up with similar charts each time.
"The decline is remarkably widespread across racial groups and geography among native-born Americans," Reynolds reported.
He believes the cause hit children in adolescence or earlier, because the impact showed up in school achievement tests and high school graduation rates.
One possible cause could be demographic factors, and another could be the increased use of gasoline-powered cars and lead additives in gasoline after 1945, Reynolds concluded.
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