A new paper claims that whereas mortality rates for 45-54-year-olds around the world have steadily headed downwards since the late 1990s, in America mortality is on the up. The less-educated are suffering most—between 1999 and 2013, deaths per 100,000 from “external causes” among those with at most a high-school degree increased by 69, compared with just 4 for those with a university degree. Had mortality rates remained on the downward path they followed between 1970 and 1998, half a million fewer lives would have been lost. By comparison, AIDS cost 650,000 American lives between 1981 and mid-2015.

Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton