The world since 1950
Each bubble is a country. Its size shows its population,[3] and its color shows its part of the world. Pick a story, or choose your own measures, then press play. This is the kind of chart the Swedish doctor and teacher Hans Rosling made famous: statistics that move.[16]
Followed countries leave a trail showing their path. Click a bubble or type a name to follow a country; on a touch screen, tap a bubble to read its numbers.
The numbers for the year shown, as a table
Income per person. Gross domestic product per person: everything a country produces in a year divided by its population, in 2011 dollars adjusted for differences in prices between countries.[2] On the income scale, equal distances mean equal multiples: going from $1,000 to $2,000 covers the same distance as going from $10,000 to $20,000.
Top 1 percent share. The richest 1 percent's share of national income before taxes, shown through 2022, the last year with direct data for most rich countries. For years without direct data, it uses the World Inequality Database's own estimates, and the hover label says so. Malawi is left out of these views: its only measure between 1980 and 2003, 64 percent in 1997, is far outside every other country's range, and the database carries it back unchanged to 1980.[6] Researchers disagree about how much the American share rose: Gerald Auten and David Splinter estimate that the top 1 percent's share of income before taxes rose by 3.0 percentage points from 1962 to 2014 (as from 10 to 13 percent of all income), against 7.6 in the estimates by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.[69]
Years of school. The average for people aged 15 to 64, estimated every five years through 2010 and filled in between; later years are projections, so they are left out.[5]
Life expectancy and child survival. Life expectancy, the average number of years a newborn would live at that year's death rates, comes from United Nations estimates. Child survival comes from United Nations estimates since 1980 and, before that, from Gapminder, the foundation Hans Rosling co-founded.[1][4] These estimates include the deaths of crises, so several trails drop sharply for a year: for example famine in China around 1960, war in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Lebanon in 1976, genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s and in Rwanda in 1994, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. The Central African Republic shows several such one-year drops in recent years, as the United Nations estimates them.
Homicide, suicide, and heart and circulatory disease. World Health Organization estimates for 2000 to 2021, from the release it published in 2024; suicide and heart rates are age-standardized, meaning adjusted so that countries with older or younger populations can be compared fairly. These are modeled estimates, built to be comparable across countries, and they can differ from a country's own records: for the United States in 2021 the homicide estimate is 5.7 per 100,000 people, while American death certificates recorded 7.8. In October 2026 the World Health Organization released revised estimates for 2000 to 2023 (6.6 for that same American homicide rate). So far its downloads cover only some of those years, and its data service has every year only for suicide; this explorer will move to the revision once the homicide and heart estimates are out for every year, and the comparison of rich democracies in Health and safety in the United States already uses it. On the homicide scale, as on the income scale, equal distances mean equal multiples.[17][18][21][78]
Life satisfaction. The average answer, from 0 to 10, when people are asked to rate their lives, from the Gallup World Poll as published in the World Happiness Report. Each year's value averages that year's survey with the two before it.[19]
How long Americans live at each income
Raj Chetty and his colleagues linked 1.4 billion tax records to Social Security death records to measure how long Americans live at every step of the income ladder.[7] The chart shows how long people who reach 40 can expect to live, based on death rates from 2001 to 2014, from the poorest 1 percent of households on the left to the richest 1 percent on the right. Follow the line from left to right, and it climbs almost the whole way. These are averages for people at each income, not forecasts for any one person.
The numbers, as tables
With the slider at All, the chart shows every income percentile (the income ladder split into 100 equal steps), 2001 to 2014 combined. Single years are too noisy to read one percentile at a time, so for each year the chart shows the researchers' trend instead: the income ladder split into twentieths, each with a straight line fitted through its 14 years, and the faint lines mark where each trend began in 2001. Income is household earnings before taxes, measured two years earlier, or at age 61 for people 63 and older, in 2012 dollars. The records show deaths by income up to age 76; beyond that, the researchers extend the pattern seen at younger ages, and from 90 on they use national death rates for everyone. Life expectancies are adjusted so that every income level has the same racial and ethnic mix as the country as a whole, so the gap does not come from differences in racial mix. Country comparisons use the World Health Organization averages the researchers published with their data.[7]
The lifespan gap between rich and poor widened in the 2000s
From 2001 to 2014, men in the richest 5 percent gained 2.3 years of life and women 2.9. In the poorest 5 percent, men gained 0.3 years and women almost none.[7] Press play to watch the right side of the chart rise while the left side barely moves.
For children, the gap between rich and poor places shrank
Not every gap widened. Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt ranked American counties by poverty and compared death rates from 1990 to 2010. Among children and young people under 20, death rates fell fastest in the poorest counties, so the gap between rich and poor places narrowed, while among older adults it widened. As these young generations grow older, the authors expect the gap in deaths at older ages to narrow too.[63]
Norway has a gap too, but its middle lives longer
Researchers used a similar method in Norway, which has universal health care and lower inequality. The gap between its richest and poorest 1 percent was 13.8 years for men and 8.4 for women, and the gap between richer and poorer Norwegians also widened from 2005 to 2015. The difference is in the middle. Norwegians lived longer than Americans across most of the income ladder, and the largest differences were for people with lower to middle incomes. Only at the very top and the very bottom were the two countries similar.[8] The comparison has limits: for it, the Norwegian study ranks people by household income after taxes, the American one by household earnings before taxes, and the two countries differ in much besides their safety nets. Norway's gap for men is nearly as wide as America's despite universal health care, which suggests that coverage alone does not close it.
What the link between income and lifespan does not prove
Part of this link runs backward. Serious illness can push a person's income down, so the poorest 1 percent includes people who are poor because they are sick. Measuring income two years earlier reduces this problem but cannot remove it. Income also travels with education, health habits, and other things that affect health, so the researchers caution that more money alone would probably lengthen lives by less than these gaps suggest.[7]
Where poor Americans live longest
Among the 100 largest American areas, the poorest quarter of adults live longest in New York and in Santa Barbara and San Jose, California, all close to 82 years. They live shortest in Gary, Indiana, about 77.4, and then in Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Tulsa, all about 77.6.[7] The places chart in Where you live matters shows what lines up with that.
Newer data: the gap by education kept growing
The income data above end in 2014. Anne Case and Angus Deaton tracked a related divide through 2021: the gap in life expectancy at 25 between Americans with and without a four-year college degree grew from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019, then to 8.5 years in 2021, during the pandemic.[28] Put simply: at the death rates of 2021, a pandemic year, a 25-year-old with a degree could expect to live eight and a half years longer than one without. The share of adults with a degree rose over these years, from 22 to 36 percent, so part of the widening could reflect who holds a degree. The authors, and studies they cite, find that this explains little of it: the gap grew with each new generation, whether or not the share with a degree changed.
Newer data: wealth and survival, the United States and Europe
A 2025 study followed 73,838 adults aged 50 to 85 in the United States and 16 European countries, 2010 to 2022. Wealthier people lived longer, and the survival gap between the richest and poorest quarters was wider in the United States than in Europe. Survival in the wealthiest quarter of Americans appeared similar to that of the poorest quarter in northern and western Europe.[29] The quarters are measured within each country, so this compares positions on each country's ladder, not dollar amounts. It also measures wealth rather than income, and covers adults 50 and older, so it does not line up exactly with the income studies above.
Doing better than your parents
Of Americans born in 1940, about 92 in 100 grew up to earn more than their parents had at the same age, age 30, after adjusting for inflation. Of those born in 1984, about 50 in 100 did. The chance fell for children of poor, middle-income, and rich parents alike.[9] The fall does not come from how income is counted: including taxes and government benefits raises the share by about 3 points in every generation, and adjusting for smaller families, it still falls from 93 to 60 in 100.[9] Other measures give higher shares for some generations: a 2012 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which followed children who lived with their parents in 1968 and adjusted incomes for family size, found that 84 percent had higher family incomes than their parents had at a similar age.[77]
The numbers, as a table
What would have kept children out-earning their parents?
The researchers tested two alternatives for children born in 1980. Growth as fast as the 1940 generation enjoyed, but shared the way it actually was, would have lifted the share who out-earned their parents from 50 percent to 62. Growth at the actual, slower pace, but shared the way it was for the 1940 generation, would have lifted it to 80, reversing more than two-thirds of the decline.[9] In the researchers' arithmetic, then, how growth was shared mattered more than how fast it came. That is accounting, not proof of cause: it holds everything else fixed, and a different way of sharing growth might also have changed how fast the economy grew.
Newer data: among children born 1978 to 1992, the rich-poor gap grew and the Black-white gap shrank
The chart above ends with children born in 1984, because a child's adult income can only be measured about 30 years after birth. A study by Chetty and colleagues at Opportunity Insights, a research group at Harvard University, first released in 2024, followed children born through 1992 with a different measure: where each child ranked at age 27 among everyone born the same year, from 0 (lowest household income) to 100 (highest). On this measure, two gaps moved in opposite directions. Among white children, the gap between those from higher- and lower-income families grew by about 28 percent. At the same time, the gap between white and Black children from lower-income families shrank by about 27 percent, because Black children gained at every parental income level while lower-income white children lost ground. These match the researchers' own figures, which their summary rounds to about 30 percent. The researchers conclude that the changes were caused by changes in the communities where children grew up, as measured by how many of the parents there had jobs; children who moved to such communities younger were affected more.[27]
The numbers, as a table
Where you live matters
Federal law is the same across the United States, though state laws differ, and outcomes for lower-income families vary a lot from place to place. Each bubble is a commuting zone: a city and the towns around it where people live and work, sized by population. Oklahoma City and Tulsa are marked. Choose an outcome and something to compare it with.
Above the chart, one number sums up the pattern. It is called a correlation, and it runs from minus 1 to plus 1: near zero means no clear pattern, and above about 0.5 either way is a strong one. You can also choose how places count. The mobility researchers counted each place equally; the lifespan researchers gave bigger places more weight. Switching between the two shows which patterns hold everywhere and which rest on a few big cities.
The 40 largest places, as a table
Children's chances line up with the middle more than the top
The researchers found that the top 1 percent's share of local income barely lines up with where children from lower-income families end up. Their chances line up far more with conditions lower down: worse where inequality among everyone else is higher, more households with children are headed by a single mother, and neighborhoods are more segregated; better where the middle class is bigger and community ties are stronger.[10] Giving bigger places more weight weakens several of these patterns but reverses none of them.
Poor people's lifespans line up with health habits and the kind of place
With bigger places weighted more, as the researchers did, the poorest quarter live longest where fewer of them smoke, and in places with more immigrants, more college graduates, and more local government spending. Local inequality barely lines up.[7] Big, expensive cities also have high top 1 percent shares, because that is where top earners live, so here the top 1 percent share lines up with longer lives. That does not make concentration good for the poor. It means rich cities differ in many ways at once. Count each place equally and all of these patterns weaken, which shows how much they rest on a few big cities.
Places are not experiments
People choose where to live, and places differ in many ways at once, so these are patterns, not proof of cause. A later study followed families who moved and found that the place itself matters: the younger a child is when the family moves to an area where children do better, the better that child does as an adult.[11]
How the bottom and middle of America have fared
These six charts follow the bottom and the middle of American life over the decades, with money adjusted for inflation. Some lines rose a long way. Others barely moved.
Household income, by position
Average income, in 2025 dollars, grew 52 percent for the poorest fifth of households from 1967 to 2025, 58 percent for the middle fifth, and 169 percent for the richest 5 percent.[12]
1967 = 100. Hover for dollar amounts. Part of the rise at the top, including a jump in 1993, reflects a change that year in how the Census Bureau, the federal agency that counts the population and its income, collected and recorded high incomes. The survey changed its methods again in 2013 and 2017, which also affects comparisons across those years. These figures count cash income before taxes, so they leave out taxes, tax credits and benefits such as food aid and public health coverage. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that analyzes the budget and the economy for Congress, counts them, and also finds that income grew fastest at the top from 1979 to 2023, though taxes and benefits made growth more even across groups.[70]
Each group's share of all income
The poorest fifth's share of all household income fell from 4.0 to 3.0 percent, and the middle fifth's from 17.3 to 13.9 percent. The richest 5 percent's share rose from 17.2 to 23.5 percent.[12]
The 1993 jump partly reflects the change that year in how high incomes were collected.
What a typical full-time worker earns
Men's typical full-time earnings set a high in 1973 that stood for 36 years. They were no higher in 2015, and in 2025 were only about 7 percent above 1973. Women's rose about 58 percent from 1973 to 2025, narrowing the gap with men.[13]
Median earnings of people working full time all year, in 2025 dollars.
People below the official poverty line
22.4 percent of Americans in 1959, and 10.2 percent in 2025, the lowest on record.[14]
The official poverty line is an income cutoff set by the federal government and adjusted for family size. The official measure counts cash income before taxes, so it leaves out tax credits and food aid. The Census Bureau's supplemental measure counts them. By that measure, child poverty was 12.5 percent in 2019 and fell to 5.1 percent in 2021, the lowest since the measure began in 2009, a drop the Census Bureau traced mainly to pandemic stimulus payments and an expanded child tax credit. After those ended, it was 12.0 percent in 2022, and 13.4 percent in 2025.[71]
Adults with a four-year college degree
4.6 percent of adults 25 and older in 1940, and 38.7 percent in 2024.[15]
Life expectancy: the United States and 20 other rich democracies
Against the average of all 20, Americans seemed to live longer in 1950, but only because the 20 include countries that were much poorer then, such as Japan, Portugal and Spain, and South Korea, then at war. Against the 11 that already had at least half the American income per person in 1950, Americans lived about a year less in 1950, between about half a year and two years less through 2000, and 3.4 years less in 2023. Where the line is drawn changes the 1950 comparison, but not the later gaps.[1][2]
All the numbers behind these six charts
Health and safety in the United States
A long life depends on more than income. These charts follow deaths from violence, suicide, drugs and heart disease, and the mental health of teenagers, as far back as these sources go and as recently as the government's provisional counts allow. A provisional count is the early tally, which can still change as late records come in.
Homicide
The homicide rate more than doubled, from 4.7 per 100,000 people in 1960 to 10.5 in 1980. It fell to 5.0 by 2014 and jumped to 7.8 in 2021. Since then it has fallen fast: 6.0 in 2024, 5.2 in 2025, and about 4.7 in the year to May 2026, about where it was in the early 1960s. The last two figures are provisional.[21][24]
Homicides per 100,000 people, all ages, as counted on death certificates: from the World Health Organization Mortality Database through 2022 and from the CDC, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since. Where the two overlap, from 2019 to 2022, they agree.
Gun deaths: suicides and homicides
Most gun deaths in the United States are suicides. In the year to May 2026, about 27,900 people died by gun suicide and 11,900 by gun homicide (provisional). Gun suicides rose every year from 2019 to 2025. Gun homicides peaked at about 21,300 in the year to October 2021 and have fallen by more than 40 percent since.[24]
Each point counts the deaths in the 12 months up to that month.
A gun at home goes with a higher risk of suicide for the people who live there.[35][36] Child-access prevention laws, which hold adults legally responsible for keeping guns out of children's reach, reduce youth gun suicides.[45] Many people store their guns locked, or away from home, while they or someone in the family goes through a hard time: suicidal crises are usually short-lived, and quick access to a gun during one adds a lot of risk.[72] Anyone struggling can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.[61]
Suicide
13.2 per 100,000 people in 1950, a low of 10.4 in 2000, a high of 14.2 in 2018 and again in 2022, and 13.7 in 2024.[22][23]
Age-adjusted: rates are adjusted so that changes in the population's age mix do not create a trend on their own.
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States.
Drug overdoses
Overdose deaths rose more than fivefold, from 6.1 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 32.6 in 2022. They fell to 23.1 in 2024 and to about 20.8 in the year to June 2025 (provisional).[22][23]
Age-adjusted deaths per 100,000 people.
Teenagers feeling persistently sad or hopeless
Among high school students, the share who felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row, in the past year, that they stopped doing some usual activities held near 28 percent from 1999 to 2011. It rose to 42 percent in 2021, was 40 percent in 2023, and fell to 33 percent in 2025. Among girls it was 53 percent in 2023 and 43 percent in 2025.[25]
From the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, taken every two years.
Heart disease
Heart disease is still the leading cause of death, but its death rate fell by about 40 percent from 1999 to 2024, from 266.5 to 157.6 per 100,000 people, with a bump during the pandemic.[22]
Age-adjusted deaths per 100,000 people.
The United States beside 20 other rich democracies
Each dot is a country; the gold dot is the United States. Hover over or tap a dot to see which country it is. The 20 are the same countries as in the life expectancy chart in How the bottom and middle of America have fared.
Life expectancy from United Nations estimates. Homicides and gun homicides from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which draws on police and justice records as well as death certificates; gun homicides are for the latest year each country reports, and 16 of the 20 report them. Suicide and heart and circulatory disease from the World Health Organization's estimates released in October 2026, age-standardized.[1][20][78] These sources do not always match the American figures in the charts above. For the United States, the rate to hold on to is the one from death certificates: 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people in 2021, and a provisional 4.7 in the year to May 2026. The UN office puts the American homicide rate for 2021 at 6.8, below the 7.8 on death certificates, and the gun homicide rate for 2023 at 4.4, below the CDC's 5.4. Two differences put the World Health Organization's heart figure above the CDC's. It now adjusts every country to a standard mix of ages that is older than the one the CDC uses, and its heart and circulatory group counts more causes than the CDC's heart disease. So its American rate for 2021, 264 per 100,000, is far above the CDC's 174.[21][22][24][78] So this page shows three American homicide rates for 2021, from three sources: 5.7 in the World Health Organization's 2024 estimates (6.6 in its October 2026 revision), 6.8 from the UN office, and 7.8 on death certificates. The year 2021 was a pandemic year and the recent American peak for homicide; at the provisional 2025 rate of 5.2, the United States would still be several times the median of the others.
All the numbers behind these charts
Counties today
The places chart in Where you live matters uses data from around 2000. This one uses recent data for 3,144 counties from County Health Rankings, a program at the University of Wisconsin that gathers federal health and economic data for every county. Most measures cover 2019 to 2023. Oklahoma County, Tulsa County and Cleveland County (Norman) are marked, and you can look up any county to compare it with its state and the country.[26]
Mental distress, diabetes, smoking and loneliness come from a national phone survey combined with a statistical model for each county, so part of the pattern among them comes from the model itself. Death rates come from death certificates. Where a county has too few deaths to report a reliable rate, the value is left out: homicide rates are available for 1,440 counties holding 90 percent of Americans, suicide rates for 2,432 holding 98 percent, and overdose rates for 2,030 holding 96 percent.[26]
The 40 most populous counties, as a table
In counties with more child poverty, lives are shorter
Counties with more children in poverty have shorter lives: a strong pattern whether each county counts equally (correlation minus 0.73) or bigger counties count more (minus 0.63). Median household income lines up just as strongly in the other direction. Income inequality within a county lines up more weakly when each county counts equally (minus 0.43), and shows no clear pattern once bigger counties count more (minus 0.09).[26] Like every pattern here, this is a pattern between places, not proof that poverty itself shortens lives.
Homicide lines up with single-parent households and child poverty
Homicide lines up most with the share of children living with a single parent (0.76 either way) and with child poverty (0.60 by population, 0.72 counting counties equally), and then with income inequality (0.43 and 0.51). Gun deaths overall, most of them suicides, line up with child poverty (0.53 and 0.60) and with lower incomes.[26] These are patterns between places, not proof of cause, and causes can run both ways: violence and imprisonment can themselves leave children with one parent.
Suicide follows a different map
Suicide is higher in rural counties (0.53 by population, 0.39 counting counties equally) and where incomes are lower (minus 0.44 and minus 0.30). Income inequality does not line up the same way: by population it goes with somewhat lower suicide rates (minus 0.29), because the biggest counties, which count most in that view, are a bit more unequal on average and have far fewer suicides. Overdose deaths follow neither pattern closely: they barely line up with how rural a county is (0.02 by population) and at most moderately with any measure here, most of all with single-parent households (0.47 by population).[26]
Oklahoma, our home state, trails the nation on lifespan, suicide and gun deaths
Humanity and AI is based in Oklahoma City, so we look at our own state here. In County Health Rankings' figures, Oklahoma's life expectancy for 2021 to 2023 is 74.0 years against 77.6 for the country. From 2019 to 2023, its suicide rate was 21.5 per 100,000 against 14.0, and its gun death rate 20.1 against 13.8. Oklahoma County (74.2 years; 21.6 gun deaths) and Tulsa County (74.5; 20.6) look like the state on lifespan and gun deaths. Their homicide rates for 2017 to 2023, 10.4 and 10.2 per 100,000, are above the state's 7.8 and the national 6.7, County Health Rankings' average for those years. Cleveland County, home to Norman, is close to the national average: 77.9 years and 12.2 gun deaths. Oklahoma's income inequality, measured as the ratio of household income at the 80th percentile to that at the 20th, is a little lower than the nation's (4.6 against 4.9).[26]
What many studies, taken together, say
A single study can mislead. A meta-analysis pools many studies of the same question into one estimate, and a systematic review gathers and grades them. Below are the largest ones on the questions this page raises, with a few large experiments. We chose them by hand rather than by a fixed rule, and other studies could add to the picture. Each line says exactly what was compared, because the numbers only mean something next to that.
How much higher is the risk?
A value of 1 means no difference; 2 means twice the risk. The line through each dot shows the range the researchers consider likely (the 95 percent confidence interval). These are relative risks, odds ratios or hazard ratios, which differ technically but read the same way here: how many times higher the risk is. Each row compares different groups, measured in different ways, so the rows cannot be ranked against each other, and none of them is a forecast for any one person. A risk several times higher can still be small for one person when the starting risk is low.
Does more money improve mental health?
Cash transfers are payments of money, usually from governments or charities. These effects are measured in standard deviations, a common yardstick for comparing studies that use different scales. By a common rule of thumb, 0.2 is small and 0.5 is medium, so every effect here is small. Higher means better mental health or well-being. All point toward better mental health, though the longest follow-up cannot rule out no effect.
In one of the largest American tests, $1,000 a month for three years brought large improvements in stress and food security in the first year. After that, mental and physical health were no better than in the comparison group; averaged over the three years, the study rules out mental health gains larger than 0.03 standard deviations.[40] The same trial found that people receiving the money worked 1 to 2 fewer hours a week, and their income apart from the transfers fell by about $1,900 a year.[73] In Baby's First Years, a randomized American trial that gave low-income mothers $333 a month from their child's birth, against $20 a month for a comparison group, the children showed no measurable effect at age four on language, self-control and planning, emotional and behavior problems, or brain activity.[74]
Gun laws: where the evidence is strongest, and where it is thin
RAND, a research organization, grades the evidence on state gun laws across 207 studies. Its fifth edition, published in January 2026, finds supportive or moderate evidence for these effects:[45]
- SupportiveChild-access prevention laws, which hold adults legally responsible for keeping guns out of children's reach, reduce self-inflicted gun injuries, including suicides, accidental gun injuries and deaths, and gun homicides and assault injuries among young people.
- SupportiveHigher minimum ages for buying a gun reduce gun suicides among young people.
- SupportiveStand-your-ground laws, which remove the duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, increase gun homicides and homicides overall.
- SupportiveShall-issue laws, which require states to grant concealed-carry permits to anyone who meets basic criteria, increase homicides, gun homicides and violent crime.
- ModerateBarring gun ownership by people under domestic violence restraining orders reduces killings by intimate partners.
- ModerateWaiting periods reduce gun suicides and total homicides.
- ModerateBackground checks reduce gun homicides and total homicides.
In RAND's scale, supportive evidence is stronger than moderate evidence. For many other policies, including extreme risk protection orders, sometimes called red flag laws, which let a court temporarily remove guns from someone judged to be a danger, and bans on high-capacity magazines, RAND finds only limited or inconclusive evidence so far; as it notes, an absence of evidence does not mean a law has no effect. All the studies it reviewed are observational, comparing places and times rather than assigning laws by chance, and RAND cautions that even the best rest on strong assumptions, so "causal conclusions should be drawn cautiously." For gun ownership itself: a meta-analysis pooling 16 studies of suicide or homicide found that people with access to a gun at home had about 3.2 times the odds of dying by suicide and 2.0 times the odds of being killed by homicide.[35]
Inequality and violence across countries
A study of homicide in 39 countries from 1965 to 1995 estimated, from 27 of them, that a lasting drop in the Gini index of inequality by 2.4 points cuts homicide by 3.7 percent at first and 20 percent in the long run.[46] A meta-analysis of cross-national studies found inequality among the strongest predictors of homicide, alongside being in Latin America.[47] For crime in general, a 2024 meta-analysis of 1,341 estimates, mostly from studies within single countries, found an effect of inequality that is statistically detectable but, in the author's words, "at best, minimal."[48]
Why working-age Americans die younger
A 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which advise the nation on science and health, found that drugs and alcohol caused more than 1.3 million deaths among Americans aged 25 to 64 from 1990 to 2017. It traced the opioid surge to weak government oversight and the drug industry's push for prescribing, and pointed to obesity and its effects on the heart. It named adverse economic trends, such as stagnant wages and collapsing job sectors, as one of three recurring themes, alongside inequality and vulnerability, though the direct effect of specific economic shocks appears modest.[50]
Inequality and health in rich countries
A review of 98 studies found "little support" for income inequality as a major, general cause of health differences within or between rich countries, with homicide and American states as partial exceptions.[49] The strictest recent meta-analysis agrees that the evidence is "too methodologically limited to support a causal relationship" for deaths.[31] Other researchers read the same literature as showing a causal effect.[52] The disagreement is about inequality as such. The syntheses here that look at poverty, low status or job loss directly all link them to worse health, though one of the largest American cash trials found no lasting health gains from extra income.[40]
Poverty and mental illness cause each other
A 2020 review in the journal Science found causal evidence in both directions: economic shocks cause mental illness, and mental illness lowers work and income. Antipoverty programs such as cash transfers improve mental health. For people with depression or anxiety in poorer countries, treatment raised employment as much as cash or job programs did, at roughly a tenth of the cost.[51]
Support in childhood has lasting effects
When food stamps reached American counties one by one between 1961 and 1975, children who had them early in life grew up with less metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, and the women became more economically self-sufficient.[64] When the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina began paying every adult member a share of casino profits, an extra $4,000 a year for the poorest families meant their children finished one more year of school by age 21 and were 22 percent less likely to commit a minor crime at ages 16 and 17.[65] In the same long-running study, children whose families rose out of poverty had fewer behavior problems, down to the level of children who had never been poor, though their anxiety and depression did not change.[66]
Despair and recovery
Deaths from suicide and overdose have many causes. No single cause explains any one death, and no death is a judgment on the people who loved that person. Most overdose deaths are not suicides: about 9 in 10 are recorded as unintentional, and most involve fentanyl or other synthetic opioids.[22][67] Counting deaths also says little about the far larger number of people who struggle and come through. For most people, hard times show up in ordinary days: how often they feel low or worried, how much they hurt, and how they rate their own health. This section looks at those days, and at the evidence that people come back from them.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is free and confidential, at any hour. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which also helps with alcohol and drug use, or chat at 988lifeline.org. 988 is also there for anyone struggling after losing someone.[61]
To find treatment for drug or alcohol use or a mental health condition, call the National Helpline of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal agency for both, at 1-800-662-4357, in English or Spanish, or search FindTreatment.gov.[62] Medicines for opioid addiction, such as methadone and buprenorphine, cut the risk of death in half for people treated long term, and naloxone, which reverses an opioid overdose, is sold without a prescription.[75][76]
Outside the United States, Find A Helpline, a free public service from the helpline directory company ThroughLine, lists verified crisis lines by country.[68]
Depression, worry, pain, poor health and missed care, by family income
Each bar is the share of adults who say this describes them, grouped by family income compared with the federal poverty line, the income cutoff the government uses to count poverty. The line depends on family size; for a family of four it is about $32,000 a year. The survey compares each family's income in the year before with that line. The answers come from the National Health Interview Survey, the federal government's main yearly survey of Americans' health.[53]
In every year from 2019 to 2025, adults below the poverty line were about three times as likely to feel depressed regularly as adults with incomes of at least twice the line.
Adults 18 and older. All bars share one scale. "Regularly" means feeling this way every day at more than a little, or every week a lot. Chronic pain means pain on most days or every day in the past three months; the survey has no pain figures for 2022 or 2024, because the question is not asked every year. On a computer, hover over a bar for the range the survey considers likely (the 95 percent confidence interval); the table lists the ranges too. A pattern like this shows that low income and these burdens go together; on its own it cannot show which causes which.
All the numbers, 2019 to 2025
Recovery is common
These surveys can only ask people who are alive and living in a home. They cannot include the people we have lost, or those in jails, hospitals or without a home. Even so, they show that recovery is common, not rare. Common is not the same as certain: some people get help and are still lost, and that is no one's failure.
Recovery from mental health problems is reported less often at the bottom of the income ladder: 61 percent of adults below the poverty line who ever had such a problem say they are recovered or in recovery, against 69 percent at twice the line or more. For drug or alcohol problems the shares are similar at every income: 76 percent below the line and 71 percent at twice the line or more.[57]
Extreme distress rose from 3.6 to 6.4 percent of adults, 1993 to 2019
Using surveys of 8.1 million Americans, two economists found that the share in extreme distress, meaning their mental health was not good on every one of the past 30 days, rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among midlife white adults with low levels of education it more than doubled, from 4.8 to 11.5 percent. Of the personal circumstances studied, being unable to work went most closely with extreme distress, and states where manufacturing's share of jobs fell saw more distress.[54]
More money goes with less unhappiness, up to a point
In a large study of working Americans, the unhappiest fifth were less unhappy at higher household incomes, but only up to about $100,000 a year. The authors suggest that what remains, such as heartbreak, grief and clinical depression, may be beyond what money can fix. The study compares people at different incomes; it did not give anyone money.[55] A review in the journal Science finds that poverty causes stress and painful feelings, which may in turn narrow attention and push decisions toward the short term, a loop that may help keep people poor.[56]
People recover in different ways
In a 2016 national survey of Americans who had resolved a drug or alcohol problem, about half (54 percent) had used some kind of help: 45 percent had gone to mutual-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, 28 percent to treatment, and 22 percent to newer kinds of support, such as sober living homes, faith-based recovery programs and recovery community centers, many to more than one. The rest reported using none of these.[58]
After self-harm, most people live, but the risk stays high for years
A review of 90 follow-up studies, mostly from Europe, found that around 93 percent of people treated at a hospital after self-harm had not died by suicide more than nine years later.[60] Their risk of suicide stays far above average for years, though, and 988 answers at any hour.[61]
What this record suggests
Prosperity reached far. Since 1950 life expectancy at birth worldwide has risen about 26 years, to about 73 in 2022. The share of children who die before age five fell from about one in four to about one in twenty-five in 2022.[1][4] In the United States, the poorest fifth of households have more real income than in 1967, the official poverty rate is the lowest on record, and the share of adults with a college degree is more than eight times what it was in 1940.[12][14][15]
How growth was shared may help explain why it did not reach further. The clearest evidence is the chance of out-earning your parents. It fell from about 92 in 100 to 50 in 100 (from 93 to 60 when incomes are adjusted for family size), and the fall holds when taxes and government benefits are counted. In the researchers' arithmetic, sharing growth the way it was shared for the 1940 generation would have restored most of the loss, while faster growth alone would not have. That is accounting, not proof of what any policy would have done.[9]
Richer Americans live much longer. Among Americans who reach 40, the richest 1 percent of men live about 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, and the gap widened in the 2000s. Norway, with universal health care, has a gap almost as wide for men and somewhat narrower for women, but its lower and middle earners live longer than Americans at the same point on the ladder.[7][8] The two countries differ in many ways besides their safety nets and measure income differently, so the comparison shows where they differ most, not what a floor, a level of living no one falls below, would do. Not every gap grew: for children, the gap in death rates between rich and poor places narrowed from 1990 to 2010.[63]
The top 1 percent's share, on its own, mostly does not line up with worse lives. Among rich countries other than the United States, a bigger top 1 percent share does not line up with shorter lives. Across all countries, much of the link between big top shares and shorter lives reflects the fact that poorer countries tend to have bigger top shares. Inside the United States, the top 1 percent's share of local income barely lines up with poor children's chances. Those chances line up instead with conditions lower down: less inequality among everyone below the top, a bigger middle class, fewer single-mother households, less segregated neighborhoods, and stronger community ties. The lifespans of poor adults line up with different things: fewer smokers, and places with more immigrants, more college graduates, and more local government spending.[7][10] Broader inequality sometimes does line up with worse lives: counties with more unequal incomes have shorter lives when each county counts equally, though the pattern disappears once bigger counties count more. This page did not test broader measures of inequality across countries.[26]
Even the size of the American top share is disputed. One reanalysis finds that from 1962 to 2014 the top 1 percent's share rose less than half as much as in the estimates by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.[69]
Across countries, homicide lines up with the top 1 percent's share, mostly through two regions; suicide follows another map. Homicide is higher where the top 1 percent take more, even among countries with similar incomes, though Latin America and southern Africa carry much of that pattern. Inside the United States, homicide fell by half from 1980 to 2014 while the top share rose, and across counties it lines up most with single-parent households and child poverty. Suicide is higher in rural counties and where incomes are lower, and studies of individuals find that a gun at home goes with a much higher risk of suicide. Overdose follows neither. Its deaths are not concentrated in rural counties, and they line up at most moderately with any of the county comparison measures shown here. Among rich democracies, the United States stands apart on homicide and gun homicide, and its death rate from heart and circulatory disease in 2021, a pandemic year, was among the highest: 264 per 100,000 in the World Health Organization's October 2026 estimates, close behind Finland (272) and Austria (267) and just ahead of Germany (256). Two recent turns stand out: in provisional counts, homicide has fallen to about its early-1960s level, and overdose deaths have dropped by more than a third from their 2022 peak.[6][20][21][22][23][24][26][35][36][78]
Our reading. This page measures how concentrated income is, not wealth. On this record, ordinary lives line up less with the share taken by the very top than with conditions lower down: how big the middle class is, how families are doing, how segregated places are and how strong community ties are. Work keeps coming up too: losing a job, being unable to work, and how many parents nearby have jobs.[27][34][54]
The strongest evidence comes from specific programs and laws. In the studies here, Medicaid went with fewer deaths in a comparison of states, and in a lottery study it cut depression, though blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar did not measurably change. Food aid and family income in childhood had lasting effects in two natural experiments. Child-access prevention laws went with fewer youth gun deaths in observational studies. One large study also found that a higher minimum wage lowered suicides among less-educated adults, mainly when unemployment was high. Cash improves mental health modestly in poorer countries. In one of the largest American trials its relief faded after the first year, and in another, cash to mothers of newborns showed no measurable effect on their children at age four.[37][40][41][42][43][45][64][65][74] The 2021 child poverty figures show how fast aid to families can lift them above the poverty line, and how fast that can reverse when the aid ends.[71]
Depression, worry, pain and poor health weigh hardest near the bottom of the income ladder. Most adults who have had a mental health or drug or alcohol problem say they are recovered or in recovery, though for mental health fewer say so below the poverty line. The evidence that more income eases these burdens is modest, so care for depression and addiction has to reach what money does not.[53][55][57] This reading fits the record on this page, but the record cannot prove it. It is a claim to test, not a finding.
For Foundation, the policy proposal from Humanity and AI for what a society owes its members in the age of intelligent machines, the record points first to supports with measured effects: health coverage, aid to families with children, care for depression, child-access prevention laws for guns and, in one study, higher wages at the bottom. This page does not review whether minimum wages cost jobs. The record also points to work, which recurs across it, from job loss to how many parents nearby have jobs. The comparison with Norway and the researchers' arithmetic on how growth was shared are reasons to look closely at the broad middle of the income ladder. They are not proof of what a floor would do there.
Read the Foundation proposalSources and method
Every number on this page comes from the sources below. The data were downloaded from the original files on September 30, 2026, except the National Health Interview Survey figures in Despair and recovery, downloaded on October 1, 2026. On October 16, 2026, four sources were brought up to date from newer official releases: the World Health Organization's October 2026 estimates (in the comparison of rich democracies), the CDC's injury counts through May 2026, the CDC's 2025 youth survey, and County Health Rankings' March 2026 county data. Research results quoted in the text are taken from the published papers and reports; the "times as likely" figures in Despair and recovery are our own calculations from the survey's published percentages. The correlations in Where you live matters are our own calculations from the researchers' published data. The mobility researchers counted each place equally and the lifespan researchers weighted places by population; using each team's own method, our figures match the ones they reported. The county correlations in Counties today, shown both ways, the comparison of homicide with top income shares in The world since 1950, with and without the countries that have only estimates, and the averages for the 11 countries already rich in 1950 in How the bottom and middle of America have fared are also our own calculations. The percentage changes for children born 1978 to 1992 in Doing better than your parents, computed from the researchers' published table, match the ones they report. The trend lines in How long Americans live at each income repeat the lifespan researchers' method and match their published changes. World averages for life expectancy are the United Nations’ own, and for child survival the United Nations’ since 1980 and Gapminder’s before that. The average years of school is our own calculation, weighted by population, across the 106 countries in the schooling story. The American health series in Health and safety in the United States join older and newer tables from the same agencies; where the tables overlap, their numbers agree.
- Our World in Data, "Life expectancy," from United Nations World Population Prospects and other sources. ourworldindata.org
- Maddison Project Database 2023, GDP per person, via Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org
- Our World in Data, "Population." ourworldindata.org
- Our World in Data, "Child mortality rate," from the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation and Gapminder. ourworldindata.org
- Our World in Data, "Average years of schooling," from Lee and Lee and from Barro and Lee. ourworldindata.org
- World Inequality Database, share of pre-tax national income held by the top 1 percent, including its estimates for years without direct data, via Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org; wid.world
- Raj Chetty and colleagues, "The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014," JAMA, 2016. jamanetwork.com; data from Opportunity Insights. opportunityinsights.org
- Jonas Minet Kinge and colleagues, "Association of Household Income With Life Expectancy and Cause-Specific Mortality in Norway, 2005-2015," JAMA, 2019, jamanetwork.com; Norwegian Institute of Public Health, "The rich are outliving the poor in both Norway and USA." fhi.no
- Raj Chetty and colleagues, "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940," Science, 2017, science.org; the working paper version, with its checks using income after taxes and transfers and adjusting for family size, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 22910, 2016, nber.org; summary and data from Opportunity Insights. opportunityinsights.org
- Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014, academic.oup.com; data from Opportunity Insights. opportunityinsights.org
- Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, "The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018. academic.oup.com
- U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables: Households, Tables H-2 and H-3. census.gov
- U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables: People, Table P-38. census.gov
- U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables: People, Table 2. census.gov
- U.S. Census Bureau, Educational Attainment in the United States, historical Table A-2. census.gov
- Gapminder Foundation, founded by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. gapminder.org
- World Health Organization, Global Health Estimates, death rates from interpersonal violence (homicide) and from cardiovascular diseases, 2000 to 2021, via Our World in Data: homicide; cardiovascular disease.
- World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory, age-standardized suicide rates, 2000 to 2021, via Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org
- World Happiness Report, life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll (the Cantril ladder), via Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org
- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, intentional homicides and homicides committed with firearms per 100,000 people, via Our World in Data: homicide; gun homicide.
- World Health Organization Mortality Database, United States homicide rate, 1950 to 2022, via Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org
- National Center for Health Statistics, age-adjusted death rates from the Health, United States tables and the Leading Causes of Death table, via the CDC data portal: suicide, 1950 to 2018 and 2018 to 2024; drug overdose, 1999 to 2018 and 2018 to 2024; heart disease, 1999 to 2017 and 2018 to 2024.
- National Center for Health Statistics, quarterly provisional estimates for selected indicators of mortality, through June 2025 for suicide and overdose and September 2025 for heart disease. data.cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mapping Injury, Overdose, and Violence, national monthly and yearly counts and rates, January 2019 to May 2026; figures from 2025 on are provisional. data.cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System: national high school results, 1999 to 2017 and 2019 to 2023; for 2025, Sandra J. Kiplagat and colleagues, "Unmet Need for Mental Health Services Among High School Students Experiencing Persistent Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness: Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2025," MMWR Supplements, volume 75, number 1, October 2026. cdc.gov
- County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, 2025 national data, countyhealthrankings.org; and its supplemental release of March 25, 2026, which updates 16 of the 23 county measures used here (the other seven, and the county populations, are from 2025). countyhealthrankings.org
- Raj Chetty, Will Dobbie, Benjamin Goldman, Sonya R. Porter, and Crystal S. Yang, "Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2026, doi.org; data from Opportunity Insights. opportunityinsights.org
- Anne Case and Angus Deaton, "Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2023. brookings.edu
- Sara Machado, Irineos Kyriopoulos, E. John Orav, and Irene Papanicolas, "Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe," New England Journal of Medicine, 2025. doi.org
- Naoki Kondo and colleagues, "Income inequality, mortality, and self rated health: meta-analysis of multilevel studies," BMJ, 2009. doi.org
- Michal Shimonovich and colleagues, "Causal Assessment of Income Inequality on Self-Rated Health and All-Cause Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," Milbank Quarterly, 2024. doi.org
- Vikram Patel and colleagues, "Income inequality and depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the association and a scoping review of mechanisms," World Psychiatry, 2018. doi.org
- Silvia Stringhini and colleagues, "Socioeconomic status and the 25 × 25 risk factors as determinants of premature mortality: a multicohort study and meta-analysis of 1·7 million men and women," Lancet, 2017. doi.org
- David J. Roelfs and colleagues, "Losing life and livelihood: a systematic review and meta-analysis of unemployment and all-cause mortality," Social Science and Medicine, 2011. doi.org
- Andrew Anglemyer, Tara Horvath, and George Rutherford, "The accessibility of firearms and risk for suicide and homicide victimization among household members: a systematic review and meta-analysis," Annals of Internal Medicine, 2014 (with the publisher's correction). doi.org
- David M. Studdert and colleagues, "Handgun Ownership and Suicide in California," New England Journal of Medicine, 2020. doi.org
- Joel McGuire, Caspar Kaiser, and Anders M. Bach-Mortensen, "A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of cash transfers on subjective well-being and mental health in low- and middle-income countries," Nature Human Behaviour, 2022. doi.org
- Rachel M. Thomson and colleagues, "How do income changes impact on mental health and wellbeing for working-age adults? A systematic review and meta-analysis," Lancet Public Health, 2022. doi.org
- Clara Wollburg, Janina Isabel Steinert, Aaron Reeves, and Elizabeth Nye, "Do cash transfers alleviate common mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries? A systematic review and meta-analysis," PLoS One, 2023. doi.org
- Sarah Miller, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Patrick K. Krause, and Eva Vivalt, "Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Guaranteed Income," National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 32711, 2024. nber.org
- Sarah Miller, Norman Johnson, and Laura R. Wherry, "Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence From Linked Survey and Administrative Data," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021. doi.org
- Katherine Baicker and colleagues, "The Oregon Experiment: Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes," New England Journal of Medicine, 2013. doi.org
- John A. Kaufman and colleagues, "Effects of increased minimum wages by unemployment rate on suicide in the USA," Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2020. doi.org
- Carlos Nordt and colleagues, "Modelling suicide and unemployment: a longitudinal analysis covering 63 countries, 2000-11," Lancet Psychiatry, 2015. doi.org
- Rosanna Smart and colleagues, The Science of Gun Policy, fifth edition, RAND, January 2026. rand.org
- Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza, "Inequality and Violent Crime," Journal of Law and Economics, 2002. doi.org
- Amy E. Nivette, "Cross-National Predictors of Crime: A Meta-Analysis," Homicide Studies, 2011. doi.org
- Matteo Pazzona, "Revisiting the Income Inequality-Crime Puzzle," World Development, 2024. doi.org
- John Lynch and colleagues, "Is Income Inequality a Determinant of Population Health? Part 1. A Systematic Review," Milbank Quarterly, 2004. doi.org
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults, 2021. doi.org
- Matthew Ridley, Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach, and Vikram Patel, "Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms," Science, 2020. doi.org
- Kate E. Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson, "Income inequality and health: a causal review," Social Science and Medicine, 2015. doi.org
- National Center for Health Statistics, National Health Interview Survey, Interactive Summary Health Statistics for Adults, 2019 to 2025, via the CDC data portal. data.cdc.gov; the poverty line for a family of four from HealthCare.gov, "Federal poverty level (FPL)." healthcare.gov The survey itself uses the Census Bureau's poverty thresholds, which also depend on family size.
- David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, "Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019," American Journal of Public Health, 2020. doi.org
- Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers, "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023, doi.org; summary from Princeton University. princeton.edu
- Johannes Haushofer and Ernst Fehr, "On the psychology of poverty," Science, 2014. doi.org
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Survey on Drug Use and Health, "Recovery from a Drug or Alcohol Use Problem or a Mental Health Issue among Adults," 2022 to 2024, published September 2025. samhsa.gov
- John F. Kelly, Brandon Bergman, Bettina B. Hoeppner, Corrie Vilsaint, and William L. White, "Prevalence and pathways of recovery from drug and alcohol problems in the United States population: Implications for practice, research, and policy," Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2017. doi.org
- Catalina Lopez-Quintero and colleagues, "Probability and predictors of remission from life-time nicotine, alcohol, cannabis or cocaine dependence: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions," Addiction, 2011. doi.org
- David Owens, Judith Horrocks, and Allan House, "Fatal and non-fatal repetition of self-harm: Systematic review," British Journal of Psychiatry, 2002. doi.org
- 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988, or chat online; free, confidential, at any hour. 988lifeline.org
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Helpline, 1-800-662-4357, samhsa.gov; and FindTreatment.gov. findtreatment.gov
- Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt, "Inequality in mortality decreased among the young while increasing for older adults, 1990-2010," Science, 2016. doi.org
- Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond, "Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net," American Economic Review, 2016. doi.org
- Randall K. Q. Akee, William E. Copeland, Gordon Keeler, Adrian Angold, and E. Jane Costello, "Parents' Incomes and Children's Outcomes: A Quasi-experiment Using Transfer Payments from Casino Profits," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2010. doi.org
- E. Jane Costello, Scott N. Compton, Gordon Keeler, and Adrian Angold, "Relationships Between Poverty and Psychopathology: A Natural Experiment," JAMA, 2003. doi.org
- Matthew F. Garnett and Arialdi M. Miniño, "Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2023-2024," NCHS Data Brief 549, National Center for Health Statistics, January 2026; 91.6 percent of overdose deaths in 2024 were unintentional. cdc.gov
- Find A Helpline, a free public service from ThroughLine that lists verified crisis lines by country. findahelpline.com
- Gerald Auten and David Splinter, "Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends," Journal of Political Economy, 2024. doi.org
- Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Household Income, 2023, September 2026. cbo.gov
- Christina Bijou and Emily A. Shrider, U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States: 2025, P60-290, September 2026, and its Table 8 of supplemental poverty estimates, census.gov; John Creamer, Emily A. Shrider, Kalee Burns, and Frances Chen, Poverty in the United States: 2021, P60-277, September 2022, on the causes of the 2021 drop in child poverty. census.gov
- Suicide Prevention Resource Center, Education Development Center, "What Clients and Families Need to Know" about firearms and suicide risk, 2019. sprc.org
- Eva Vivalt and colleagues, "The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States," National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 32719, 2024. nber.org
- Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan and colleagues, "The Effect of a Monthly Unconditional Cash Transfer on Children's Development at Four Years of Age: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the U.S.," National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 33844, 2025. nber.org
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Save Lives, 2019. doi.org
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "FDA Approves First Over-the-Counter Naloxone Nasal Spray," March 29, 2023. fda.gov
- The Pew Charitable Trusts, Economic Mobility Project, Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations, July 2012. pewtrusts.org
- World Health Organization, Global Health Estimates 2000 to 2023: age-standardized death rates by cause and country (suicide and cardiovascular diseases) and crude death rates (homicide), files dated October 1, 2026, released October 2, 2026. who.int