It's never felt like the top is in to me before, but... it finally feels like the top is in?
The drag from productivity loss due to increasing levels of frequent illness and / or long-term illness and increasing numbers of people leaving the workforce due to long-term illness / permanent disability or to fill unpaid caregiver roles to care for others who have left for those reasons just seems overwhelming. Like it would be hard to overcome this drag even if there were effective policies being rolled out to try to address it? Not to mention compounding effects on workforce quality from increasingly sick kids being taught by increasingly sick teachers or on workforce size from declining fertility rates.
And all the primary drivers of poor health are trending in the wrong direction - heart disease rates, obesity rates, diabetes rates, cancer rates, covid rates, healthcare costs, healthcare quality, healthcare access, traffic injury / fatality rates, overdose rates etc..
It just feels like the US market is completely failing to price in either the existing escalating impacts from the accelerated decline in population health or the ability of those impacts to impair resiliency to other unrelated market shocks?