Oh right, how could I forget the thousands of bodies stacked high in 2009, dead from unemployment.  

In 2015, life expectancy in the wealthiest country in the world fell for the first time in decades. Then came the nearly unfathomable: Life expectancy in the US fell again in 2016 — and for a third time in a row in 2017.

It is hard to communicate just how disquieting that trend is. Outside of wars or pandemics, life expectancy across the world has been consistently rising for almost a century, and has become a hallmark of highly developed nations. The last time a three-year downturn in life expectancy happened in the US was more than a century ago when the 1918 flu pandemic wiped out anywhere between 17 million and 100 million people worldwide.

What was happening? As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first pointed out in a 2015 paper, working-age white men and women without four-year college degrees were dying of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease — what Case and Deaton termed “deaths of despair” — at unprecedented rates. In 2017 alone, there were 158,000 deaths of despair in the US: the equivalent of “three fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year.”