On Life Expectancy; Also, William Giraldi and Kanye West Agree

Fascinating and somehow totally endearing video from Aeon has a wise-sounding wonky guy walking us through the correlation between income and life expectancy. And that correlation is stark. Essentially, in the poorest regions of the world, where people make, on average, $500 a year, per capita, there is no country where people’s average life expectancy is higher than 64. Whereas in the richest regions, where people make, on average, $50,000 a year, per capita, there is no country where average life expectancy is lower than 74.

But there’s more! Most people, after all, exist in the middle, and that’s where the unexpected variations are.

Start your Monday morning right, with this dude’s soothing voice and his colorful chart.

Can’t watch even a 2-minute video at work? It’s okay, we got you covered. Here’s an article about the state of artists in the US from the New Republic that I’m predisposed to hate, because it’s by William Giraldi. Perhaps you feel more objective?

The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty — what is usually called, in a kind of blustering spasm, the richest empire on earth — the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy.

In a 1966 UCLA study, 86 percent of students across the country declared that they intended to have a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half, “meaningful” no doubt replaced by “moneyful.” Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000.

That is sad! I agree. I worked for an arts non-profit and, though our grantees produced fantastic work, even we had a hard time making the argument to our funders that the arts were relevant and important. In related news, the non-profit has since shut down.

My favorite line from this piece is, “We in America kill our poets in quite another way: We ignore them to death.” But one has to ask, has any nation ever particularly valued its poets? When I think “poet,” I think garrets, tuberculosis, absinthe, and occasionally sodomy. The lives of the successful ones have been glamorous sometimes but nearly always destitute; in fact, the destitution has always rather added to the glamour.

Of course, as Giraldi points out, the lack of any opportunity for financial advancement hasn’t even put a dent in the number of prospective poets. My god, they’re everywhere. Giraldi’s solution is to ignore them himself: “yet, somehow, we’re awash in dilettantes decanting their wares on the midden of American culture.” We don’t support art! There are too many fake artists! How will the real ones survive!

Or as Kanye put it, “Beck needs to respect artistry, and he should have given his award to Beyoncé. And at this point, we tired of it because what happens is, when you keep on diminishing art, and not respecting the craft, and smacking people in the face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you’re disrespectful to inspiration.”

Let’s give the last word to Dorothy Parker:

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!

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