US children are 80 percent more likely to die before adulthood than children in peer nations. Causes range from lax gun laws to privatized health care. What connects them is a corrosive culture of individualism that makes child safety parents’ private business.
Hm… maybe I am wrong. It’s definitely not just a conservative talking point, it was how historians looked at early modern cities for a while, I thought. But it seems like modern historians aren’t sure that’s the case:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598176
With just a quick look around, I couldn’t find anything that seemed definitive in the other direction, but also, the little preview that shows of that paper seems like it does a pretty good job of saying “Yo the reasons they said this is true are incredibly weak when you dig into them.” So maybe it was just premodern science from the leeches-and-ECT days.
There’s also this. Deaths are exceeding births in almost half the US, now:
https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/deaths-exceeded-births-nearly-half-us-counties-last-year
(And, of course, it’s mostly in the rural areas)
Thanks for digging into that!