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July 2, 2025

Midcentury stagnation in health and education

Evidence of a steady decline in the well-being of American cohorts born between 1947 and the mid-1960s

Tyler Smith

Source:monkeybusinessimages

During the first half of the twentieth century, health and human capital steadily improved in the United States. But for cohorts born after 1947, there was a sudden break in that progress.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review: Insights, author shows that the well-being of Americans born between 1947 and the mid-1960s steadily deteriorated in many dimensions compared to previous cohorts.

Reynolds drew his conclusions from government data on wages, birth weight, mortality, and schooling for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Figure 1 from his paper shows six series tracking key life outcomes for Americans born between 1930 and 1965.

from Nicholas Reynolds (2025)

Panel A shows men's wages slowly rising for those born before 1947, then sharply declining. Panel B reveals that women were giving birth to progressively fewer low birth weight infants—suggesting improving maternal health—but this progress suddenly stopped for those born after 1947. Panels C and D show mortality rates for men and women; both show similar patterns of steady improvement followed by stagnation and reversal around the 1947 birth cohort. Panels E and F show educational attainment steadily rising for men and women, and then abruptly changing course in 1947.

These charts reveal strong evidence that generations born after 1947 experienced a widespread societal decline, a fundamental break from the previous progress.

This broad decline in health and human capital may be tied to several economic puzzles. The wage stagnation plaguing America since the 1970s could partly stem from declining human capital in post-1947 cohorts. Rising midlife mortality rates since 1999 could reflect deeper, decades-old health declines as much as the widely studied deaths of despair. Educational declines of the 1960s and 1970s may be more of a function of underlying changes in student populations than failures of the education system. 

Overall, the findings may help provide a unified explanation for a wide array of social setbacks in the second half of the twentieth century.