Life is a series of phases. Childhood, youth, adulthood and old age each have aspects of living to explore. Childhood - exploring and absorbing the wonder of a new world. Youth - learning the skills of life. Adulthood - using life skills to work, make a home and develop wisdom. Old age - have time to enjoy life and use the wisdom one has developed.

A phrase I have often heard in my life is "no one respects the elderly, anymore." Actually I believe as a culture America does not value wisdom. People are defined by their job, earning (spending) potential or what they own, not the lessons and skills they have acquired.

Decreasing value American society places on the experience that comes with age is getting harder to ignore.

The return to experience is not the best-known economic concept, but it is alive in most of our contemporary economic spook stories, in which the callow private-equity analyst has the final power over an industry in which people have long labored, in which the mechanical robot replaces the assembly-line worker, in which the doctor finds his diagnosis corrected by artificial intelligence. It seemed to match at least one emotional vein that ran through the Trump phenomenon, and the more general alienation of the heartland: people are aging, and they are not getting what they think they have earned.

I spoke to Case by phone recently, and she emphasized that the connections between the deaths from despair and the declining returns to experience are still at the hypothesis stage. But, if you wanted to spool out the hypothesis, you could find a compelling story. The chronology matched some general changes in the nature of working-class work, which grew less skilled over time and therefore provided lesser returns to experience. If you focussed on white workers without a college degree, the decline in returns to experience began with those born around 1955. This matched the story of despair deaths, whose appearance Case and Deaton pinpointed at 1990, just when the 1955 birth cohort passed into early middle age. As that group’s declining wages helped usher them out of the labor force, it made sense that more of them might turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. The pattern, begun thirty-five years ago, has not abated. “There are still returns to experience,” Case said, “but they are lower for every birth cohort.”

The increase of mortality appears to effects both rural and urban areas in similar patterns. It appears the trend will continue to worsen. Long read, there will be no easy answers.

Figure 1.1 shows mortality rates per 100,000 for men and women (combined) aged 50 to 54 from 1999 to 2015.

What our data show is that the patterns of mortality and morbidity for white non-Hispanics without a college degree move together over lifetimes and birth cohorts, and that they move in tandem with other social dysfunctions, including the decline of marriage, so-cial isolation, and detachment from the labor force. Figure 3.3 suggests that there may be two underlying factors, not one, but they are not very different, and we do not press that conclusion. Whether these factors (or factor) are “the cause” is more a matter of semantics than statistics. The factor could certainly represent some force that we have not identified, or we could try to make a case that declining real wages is more fundamental than other forces. Better, we can see globalization and automation as the underlying deep causes. Ul-timately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high school educated, working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline.

Why farm, preserve food, cook from scratch, grow fuels and create textiles? I find it interesting and provides an environment to try new ideas and skills. The skills I learn and practice keep traditions alive that humans have participated in for thousands of years. I spent my childhood in the country, youth a mixture of city and country, adulthood made my money in cities and my old age will be in the country.

Currently sharing the milk mom's producing for this guy.

The next 8 weeks we will be putting up the milk products to use for the next year. He will then be big enough to use all of her milk.