On a whim, he picked up an almanac from 1917 and looked up the U.S. life expectancy. It was, he recalls, about fifty-one years. He then turned to the almanac from 1919. The life expectancy was about the same. Then he looked at the 1918 almanac. The life expectancy was thirty-nine years, he says. “What the hell happened? The life expectancy had dropped to what it had been fifty years before.”
