Friday, March 13, 2026

Dead End: NAFTA and Life Expectancy

It's good to have an MIT study back you up, but if you lived in Flint in the '70s and '80s you probably already knew this:

"A new paper adds to the understanding of NAFTA’s costs. In it, economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago found that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994," Ana Swanson writes in the New York Times.
"The new study concludes, for example, that in the first 15 years of NAFTA, about 3 percent of 45-year-old men lost a year of their remaining life expectancy as a result of the trade deal. The researchers saw increases in mortality across most major causes of death, including illness, drug overdoses and suicides. The overall trends particularly affected working-age men, and were more pronounced in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest, like Michigan."