How Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter lost cultural cachet.
One of the oddities of getting old is bearing witness as the pop culture you used to think would always be beyond reproach slowly slides out of favor. As millennials age into the solid middle of the culture here at the end of 2021, they’re getting to experience that disorienting slip with some of the most beloved pop culture of their youths, and most particularly the pop culture that was celebrated during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Sunny, wholesome, nominated-for-16-Emmys Parks and Recreation is now widely considered an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the failures of Obama-era liberalism. Iconic and beloved Harry Potter is the neoliberal fantasy of a transphobe. Perhaps most dramatic of all is the rapid fall of Hamilton and its creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose reputation is now one of embarrassing earnestness.
Gossip Girl, hyper-aware in all its incarnations of the preferred status symbols of mean teens, sounded the death knell there. The 2021 HBO revival of Gossip Girl sees its cast of wealthy Upper East Side teenagers enjoying a night out at the Public Theatre, where Hamilton first premiered off-Broadway in 2015.
“You know, I saw Hamilton here with Max, before it went on Broadway,” brags one of the teens, hoping to impress his cool new girlfriend Zoya. “You into that play?”
Zoya, the wokest of the group and the one with the most sophisticated literary taste, sighs deeply and rolls her eyes. “No doubt it’s a work of art,” she allows. “But …”
Zoya doesn’t finish her sentence. She doesn’t have to; by now, the critiques of Hamilton are so well established that the audience can fill in the blanks on its own: Hamilton, according to current conventional cool-person wisdom, glorifies the slave-owning and genocidal Founding Fathers while erasing the lives and legacies of the people of color who were actually alive in the Revolutionary era. It is no longer considered to be self-evidently virtuous or self-evidently great.
Zoya’s heavy sigh signals something about Hamilton’s current status, too. It proves that the show is no longer cool.
That’s true of all the works and public figures I’m discussing here. Political critiques have their place, but the real sign that the shibboleths of millennial pop culture have lost their cultural capital is that right now, they mostly just feel kind of cringe.
Lin-Manuel Miranda gazing out at the audience with misty eyes at the end of Hamilton? Cringe. Grown adults debating their Hogwarts houses? Cringe. An article in which fictional character Leslie Knope shares words of comfort after Donald Trump’s 2016 election on this very website? So so so cringe.
Part of the decline these properties have experienced is simply a natural response to overexposure. They reached a level of cultural saturation that made them inescapable, and a backlash inevitably ensued. Yet there’s also something about precisely which relics of Obama-era pop culture have come in for special reviling in 2021. They’re not necessarily associated with Obama himself.
Instead, they are all media that tends to celebrate people who work through the grind of bureaucracy to make their great achievements; media much venerated for their identity politics of representation; media with a firm but vague political identity of liberal centrism.
They are, in short, media that celebrates the qualities associated with our collective pop cultural understanding of Hillary Clinton.
So as 2021 comes to a close, and we have begun to grasp what President Joe Biden’s America looks like, let’s take a step back. We can trace which formerly beloved works of pop cultural liberalism have fallen out of favor in the tumultuous years since 2016, which ones have risen up to take their place, and come to understand what all of the above can tell us about how we’re thinking of America right now.
On the eve of the 2016 election, left-leaning pop culture was celebrating hard work and representation that mattered. Hillary Clinton was its poster child.
Parks and Recreation ended in 2015, and Hamilton premiered in the same year. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with its much-heralded Black Hermione, premiered in 2016, offering a highly anticipated extension of a series that had been foundational to the Harry Potter generation as a story of diversity and difference conquering racism and small-minded conformity. So on the eve of the 2016 US election, there was a clear archetype operating at full strength in American popular culture: a sincere celebration of playing by the rules, working hard within the system, and being rewarded with the chance to smash through the barriers of systemic discrimination. And no one epitomized that archetype better than Hillary Clinton as pop culture understood her.
To be clear, when I’m talking about our pop cultural understanding of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the actual Hillary Clinton, the politician who published real policy papers and had an interesting if fraught voting record. Nor am I talking about the shrill, castrating harpy (or villain in a pedophile-ring conspiracy theory) that many on the right talk about when they use Hillary Clinton’s name. I mean the liberal caricature of Hillary Clinton, the flat but far-reaching portrait of Hillary that dominated the left-wing political ecosystem for decades.
When pop culture celebrated that idea of Hillary Clinton, it was celebrating some very specific traits: She was celebrated for doing hard, unglamorous work. She was admired for grinding through dull bureaucratic processes to come to a reasonable political compromise, for being pragmatic rather than inspirational. “Bitches get stuff done,” said Tina Fey of Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live in 2008. Clinton does “the work of retail politics,” wrote Rebecca Traister for New York magazine in 2016, “like an Olympic athlete.”
In tandem, pop culture properties like Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter celebrated the heroes who made their way through boring political red tape to enact true change.
“How do you write like you’re running out of time?” asks a wonderstruck Aaron Burr in Hamilton as piles of parchment signifying the groundwork for a new economic system accumulate around the musical’s title character. Parks and Recreation frequently returned to the sight gag of Leslie Knope plowing her way through a stack of binders that contained everything she needed to make some tiny, ever-so-meaningful tweak to one of the parks of Pawnee, Indiana. Harry Potter repeatedly celebrated the anxious over-preparedness of Hermione Granger and her constant refrain of, “Honestly, am I the only one who’s ever read Hogwarts: A History?”
So it came to be fashionable, during the 2016 election, to draw recurring parallels between Hillary and all of her hard-working pop cultural analogues. Hillary Clinton is the Hermione of politics, commenters argued. Or, in fact, she is Leslie Knope, which means the haters need to get over themselves. Clinton herself quoted Hamilton when she accepted her nomination at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and then Lin-Manuel Miranda rewrote the lyrics to “The Ten Duel Commandments” for a Hillary fundraiser.
Besides being celebrated for her work ethic, Hillary was also celebrated for the historic nature of her identity. She was the first woman to win the nomination of a major party for the presidency. She was the first woman to win the popular vote for the presidency. Regardless of where her politics lay, the sheer fact of her existence was radical and boundary-breaking.
Likewise, Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter were all celebrated for the symbolic force of their politics of representation. Hamilton had actors of color playing the Founding Fathers in a move that was, New York magazine’s 2015 review declared, “more than colorblind; it’s a key to the story as it projects into the future.” Parks and Rec was lauded for the “quietly consistent argument for feminism” in its portrayal of an ambitious female politician. Harry Potter had earned feminist credit for its strong female characters, the argument being that “the Harry Potter universe is full of take-charge women and supportive men who don’t let a silly thing like gender constructs get in the way of their fight against the evil forces of the world.”
Then Donald Trump became president instead of Hillary Clinton, and everything changed.
Since the 2016 election, cultural capital has ebbed away from Clinton and the pop culture most associated with her
In the five years since Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, pop culture’s support of her — and of her specific hard-working archetype — has waned.
Pop culture was still interested in wholesome stories about good people during the Trump era. Certainly there were still plenty of antiheroes and villains; The Handmaid’s Tale made Trump’s misogyny the leering ogre at the center of its dystopia, and Succession’s cynical Roy family views the world through the same power-above-all lens that Trump did. But there were also shows like The Good Place (from Parks and Recreation showrunner Michael Schur) and Netflix’s revamped Queer Eye, both of which made their debuts to critical acclaim during this era.
What distinguished the wholesome pop culture of the Trump era was that it seemed to be starting from zero. While pop culture’s Hillaries tended to be presented as fully-cooked good people whom we could all emulate, in the Trump era, wholesome pop culture tended to center itself around fundamentally flawed people who were trying to be good, and not always succeeding. The protagonists of The Good Place started in hell and had to work their way painfully up to heaven over the course of four seasons. The heroes of Queer Eye all had some major personality flaw or emotional obstacle to try to conquer over the course of each episode.
Moreover, the pop culture of the Trump years wasn’t always sure what goodness itself would look like. The Good Place held up one moral philosophy after another for examination and often found them wanting. Queer Eye could not always offer its subjects a convincing redemption. It was as though we were in an era in search of an ideal.
And when we came out the other side, pop culture seemed to have concluded that it wasn’t going back to the Hillary role model.
Clinton’s biggest moment in 2021 pop culture came courtesy of American Crime Story: Impeachment — which, while sympathetic, focused less on Clinton’s accomplishments than on her humiliations at her husband’s hands.
Meanwhile the real tell, as ever, remains the mean teens.
Early on in HBO Max’s buzzy The White Lotus (not a show about pop culture liberalism per se, but very much a show about cultural capital), two terrifyingly cool college students begin gossiping knowingly to each other about Hillary Clinton. “Like she actually cared about the working poor,” one of them says dismissively.
“She was a neoliberal war hawk,” returns the other, Olivia. “She was a neolib and a neocon.”
“Oh. Oh, is that the trendy thing they’re teaching now, to hate on Hillary Clinton?” demands Olivia’s mother, a high-powered executive in her 50s played by Connie Britton. “Hillary Clinton is one of the most influential women of the last 30 years, and many women in my generation very much admire Hillary Clinton.”
“Mom, don’t get triggered,” Olivia says. She adds sarcastically, “We all love Hillary Clinton.”
Like Zoya with Hamilton, Olivia doesn’t need to explain why she doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. The fact of her not liking Hillary signifies Olivia’s cool, her progressive politics. It shows that she has her finger on the pulse. Her mother’s knee-jerk defense of Hillary, meanwhile, shows how behind-the- times she is.
Hillary lost the election to Donald Trump. She and her hard work and her commitment to navigating the constraints of the system and her politics of representation did not save us. In response, the culture has turned on her. In America’s popular imagination, she’s become a symbol of all the worst impulses of the Democratic Party establishment: both a neolib and a neocon. So the art to which Hillary was continually compared throughout the 2016 election is reviled now, too.
Hamilton is understood to use its color-conscious casting to “whitewash” the slave-owning founding fathers. Harry Potter, fans note to each other significantly, “was a trust fund jock who became a cop and married his high school sweetheart,” and moreover his author is transphobic. Parks and Recreation is a symbol of the failure of liberalism in the face of Donald Trump.
“That’s what Parks and Rec did for most of its run, assuaging the anxieties of managerial-class liberals by telling them everything would be okay if we trusted the grownups — the Obamas, the Clintons, the Knopes — to look out for us,” wrote Timothy Shenk for Dissent in 2019. Shenk argued that Parks and Recreation’s finale, which flashes forward into the future all the way up to 2048, ignored America’s increasingly unstable politics to assure fans that at least Leslie Knope was going to live a happy life: “By the end of the show, optimism meant a future where public services are gutted, a handful of corporations dominate the economy, and all your favorite characters are doing just splendidly.”
I am not here to argue that these properties are all definitively regressive works of neoliberal propaganda and that there is no other way of understanding them. It’s still possible to have more radical interpretations of all of these works, perhaps especially of Hamilton. It’s also still possible to respect the achievements of Hillary Clinton. But the pendulum of cultural opinion has swung out of their favor.
It used to be that you demonstrated your cred by saying you saw Hamilton at the Public. Now you demonstrate your cred by saying you have your doubts about Hamilton’s racial politics.
The new face of mainstream American pop cultural liberalism is Ted Lasso
I also don’t want to argue that this shift away from Hillary and her analogues means mainstream America is moving toward embracing a radical new leftism in its popular culture. What I think it actually means is that pop culture’s understanding of mainstream political virtue has shifted toward a new model, one that is slightly, tellingly different from the one Hillary symbolized.
One of the most discussed new shows of the past couple of years is the Apple TV+ sitcom Ted Lasso. It is in many ways a direct descendant of Parks and Recreation: a sitcom animated by the same sense of sweetness, offering viewers the same chance to luxuriate in a world of niceness.
But while Parks and Rec was organized around a hard-working and ambitious blonde woman, played by an actress who had played Hillary Clinton on SNL, Ted Lasso has a different anchor.
The titular Ted Lasso is an American college football coach who moves to England to coach a professional soccer team, and he is the moral center of his show. Ted is a folksy, avuncular figure. He is a white man who understands the problems with white men, who is working hard to redeem the rest of his gender. He is able to walk into a football franchise that has been run into the ground by poor leadership and turn it around again, not with dull paperwork and rule-following — both of which escape him — but by the sheer force of his vision. His superpower is his empathy, and he is much admired for his ability to find common ground with some of his enemies, as well as his willingness to declare others (notably Rebecca’s wicked ex-husband Rupert) beyond help.
He is even played, like Leslie Knope, by an actor who played a prominent politician on SNL; Jason Sudeikis used to be SNL’s Biden.
As both the backlash toward Ted Lasso’s second season and Biden’s plummeting approval ratings both demonstrate, our patience with this archetype is not infinite. Still, right now, Ted Lasso is the collective liberal fantasy of who Joe Biden could be if we maybe all wished hard enough. He’s replaced the collective fantasy of who Hillary Clinton could be after she failed to best Donald Trump. And only time will tell us if we’ll end up repudiating him — and all his pop cultural analogues — too.
A 1-minute mindfulness practice helped settle my ADHD-addled mind.
One morning this summer, I sat at my desk feeling restlessness boil inside me. I’d recently moved from a chaotic and deadline-driven job to one with a lot of downtime and zero pressure. On paper it sounded amazing, but I was putting off projects for weeks.
The tasks were either overwhelmingly big or mind-numbingly boring. And I was starting to feel guilty about not getting them done.
So what did I do? Water the plants, start a to-do list, respond to a few emails, check social media, buy my sister a gift, check social media, add to my to-do list, turn on music, leave and go to the gym — everything but the most important tasks.
Then, in a panic, I’d pull an all-nighter, relying on a caffeine-fueled crunch to get me to the finish line. The next day, feeling deflated, depleted, and embarrassed by the quality of my work, I’d crash.
Desperately seeking focus
After a few of these vicious cycles, I worried that I was either too burned out to muster any strength or discipline, or that decades of multitasking had broken my brain. Trying to focus and prioritize was like listening to a symphony in which all of the instruments were always center stage, all playing at the same volume at the same time.
So I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatric nurse, who, after an hour and a half phone session, diagnosed me with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
ADHD — a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by varying degrees of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity — is more common in children, affecting more than 9 percent of kids under the age of 18 in the US, according to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Estimates of the prevalence of ADHD in adults vary significantly, but a 2016 study published in the journal Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders found that nearly 3 percent of adults globally have received the diagnosis. Another study of US cases reported a 123 percent increase in adult ADHD diagnoses from 2007 to 2016, four times the increase in ADHD diagnoses among children.
My diagnosis was both a blow and a relief.
I left the appointment with a prescription for Adderall, a stimulant that increases dopamine and norepinephrine levels in the brain to improve motivation and focus. (Doctors also often prescribe cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy that can help challenge negative thought patterns that can lead to anxiety or addictions.)
Discovering mindfulness for the ADHD brain
The Adderall worked like a charm. I felt calmer, my attention only pulled in a few directions, rather than 100. But it also felt like a temporary fix. Adderall works on a day-to-day basis and doesn’t help rewire your brain to help build focus over time.
I’d heard mindfulness practices could be useful for attention training and longer-term emotional regulation, and were backed by a strong body of scientific evidence. Could they work for ADHD too? I ended up on a website called MindfullyADD.
Developed by educators, nurses, and doctors who’ve worked with ADHD patients, the platform offers short breath-, attention-, and movement-based practices designed to help people find focus and feel more settled and in control.
I tried something called a “1-Minute Do- Nothing Practice,” described as a way to build tolerance to boredom. There was near-constant narration to help hold my focus, but it was still agony: I wanted to check my phone, straighten up my desk, pick up my matcha.
Next, I tried a “1-Minute Elevator Practice,” a narrated exercise that asks you to bring your hands together at your belly button, and then move the top hand up with your inhalations and back down with your exhalations. This was remarkably more effective at helping me focus, as I had something to track: my breath.
I started adding these practices to my day, randomly, whenever they fit in. And I began to see how fast and furiously my brain switched from one task or thought to the next.
I went through moments of self-loathing, thinking, “mindfulness should be easy for me.” (I had a meditation practice, but sitting for 30 minutes, focused on a single object, had been, if I was honest with myself, overwhelming.)
Often, I felt too tired or busy to practice even the short mindfulness practices on MindfullyADD. The growing awareness of my distracted and disjointed mind became really uncomfortable. But I was starting to find pauses between the distractions and thoughts, which felt empowering.
Casey Dixon, the strategist behind MindfullyADD and the founder of a program called Live Well ADHD, told me that my situation was not unusual. “Right now, most people who are getting diagnosed are women who are not in their 20s anymore and who are learning suddenly that a lot of their lifestyle habits are related to ADHD.” (I’m 46.) And one of the biggest obstacles her clients face is following through on work and life plans.
The ADHD brain
After experiencing some of the benefits of mindfulness firsthand, I called up Lidia Zylowska, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the author of The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD, to find out how the brains of people with ADHD are different from other people who feel distracted.
Many people, she said, have ADHD-like symptoms, including difficulty focusing and organizing, when we’re faced with stressful situations, inadequate sleep, burnout, and unrelenting bad news in the media. “But if you have actual ADHD, you have these symptoms even when you’re not stressed.”
Studies that track what’s happening in ADHD brains through imaging, or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have shown atypical activity in neural networks associated with cognitive control, attention, and working memory. In addition, parts of the brain related to emotional regulation and motivation may look different in people with ADHD. Imaging also shows that the default mode network (DMN) — which is linked to mind wandering — is more active in people with ADHD when they are attending to tasks.
Some people with ADHD have enough coping strategies and support to mask it. But then the context changes and their symptoms can become less manageable.
A couple of common pain points are when people move into jobs with less structure and they are expected to self-manage throughout the day (aha!), and when people become parents and have to manage more than just themselves. For women specifically, hormonal changes, particularly during perimenopause, can bring ADHD to the surface.
Some of the psychiatric nurse’s questions made me realize that constant triaging at work had become my coping strategy. I also started thinking about patterns of procrastination that went as far back as elementary school. I started to see that I’d always been paralyzed by the fear of not completing something perfectly. I’d set myself up, over and over, for failure.
How mindfulness works to help treat ADHD
Mindfulness, the practice of present-moment awareness without judgment, has a nearly 5,000-year history with roots in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions and philosophies. It has been studied in the US since the 1970s for various mental health issues, including stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, and pain management.
One of the first major research studies to look at mindfulness as a treatment for ADHD was done by Zylowska, when she was working at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California Los Angeles. Her original study, published in 2007 in the Journal of Attention Disorders, looked at the effects of a mindfulness program on adolescents and adults with ADHD.
The 24 adults and eight adolescents in the study were asked to practice sitting meditation, body and breath awareness, mindful listening and speaking, and self-compassion on a daily basis for eight weeks. Afterward, they reported improvements in their symptoms, tested better on attention tasks, and even saw reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. Zylowska and her colleagues concluded that mindfulness could be an effective intervention in some adults and adolescents with ADHD — yielding improvements in overall ADHD symptoms — but that a controlled clinical study was needed.
Since 2007, there have been dozens of other studies, some with small sample sizes and no controls, others with larger sample sizes and active controls that support the use of mindfulness for ADHD, says John Mitchell, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine.
A 2021 research review of 31 studies on mindfulness for ADHD, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, concluded that mindfulness is just as effective as, if not slightly more than, education and life skills training for treating adults with inattentiveness. The evidence isn’t in for mindfulness and children with ADHD.
Both Zylowska and Mitchell agree that more research would help determine which mindfulness practices are best for different folks with ADHD. “The research is in early stages, compared to other interventions for ADHD,” says Zylowska. Based on the existing data, if symptoms of ADHD are mild to moderate, mindfulness may be a great stand-alone treatment, says Zylowska. But if symptoms are severe, people with ADHD may want to use mindfulness as a complement to other treatments
How to adapt mindfulness practices for ADHD
Meditation and mindfulness may not at first seem like a good fit for chronically restless ADHD people, says Mitchell.
That’s why Zylowska’s eight-week program includes both “formal” seated or walking meditation and “informal” mindfulness, like being present with tastes, sounds, textures, and sounds while you eat. You start with practicing for five minutes and work your way up to 15. If five minutes is still too much, Zylowska says, start with three.
“When you have ADHD, you have to find solutions that are easy enough to fit into your life,” explains Dixon. “If they create a lot of friction, they won’t get done.”
Zylowska agrees: “These are not new practices, but we are making them more accessible to people who have difficulty sustaining attention.” They are shorter, are introduced more gradually, and have more variety, so you can experiment with what works for you.
You can also tailor the practice depending on the type of distractibility or ADHD you have. If you have more hyperactivity and impulsivity, you may want to focus on mindful movement. If this is all overwhelming, just think of an activity that already helps you calm down, like cooking or gardening, and do more of that, with awareness, advises Zylowska.
One minute at a time
As I continue with the practices from MindfullyADD, I start to feel more space in my brain and my life. I try to practice daily, even if just for a minute. While I can still procrastinate and overcommit, this one-minute-at-a-time approach has ultimately translated into a one-step-at-a-time effort at work. (I still take Adderall, but infrequently.)
I can now better tolerate mind-numbing spreadsheets, and I can read for more than five minutes at a time. I don’t beat myself up about not accomplishing more. Instead, I celebrate the small wins, take conscious breaks that help me reset and feel less enmeshed with work, and I feel perfectionism and black-and-white thinking losing their hold.
Dixon reminds me to keep it simple: “You don’t need to have the perfect mindfulness set-up and practice, just pick something and try it.”
Tasha Eichenseher is a science and wellness writer based in Boulder, Colorado.
You can’t see particles smaller than 2.5 microns. But they kill 3.4 million people a year.
Climate change is going to have profound consequences on human health and survival. Most obviously, a hotter world means more heat stroke and other heat-caused deaths.
A recent study on the mortality cost of climate change found that every 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted — about the combined lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans, the study estimates — will cause a heat- related death this century.
But the situation is even worse than that number suggests. Danny Bressler, the environmental economist who authored the paper, notes his estimate leaves out some other potential climate-related deaths, like those from flooding and reduced food supply. He’s just estimating what higher temperatures alone will do, writing that he “does not consider likely mortality co-benefits of stricter climate policies, such as decreases in particulate matter pollution.”
That’s a technical way of putting it. Here’s a simpler way: When we burn fossil fuels, not all the resulting pollution goes up high into the atmosphere. Some of it accumulates in the air that we breathe every day.
And it kills us. A lot of us. The Global Burden of Disease study, a common benchmark for public health work, estimates that 3.4 million people die prematurely every year due to air pollution. More recent research puts the total even higher, at 10 million a year. A recent paper suggested that 90 percent of the world’s population lives in areas with air pollution higher than World Health Organization guidelines (guidelines that the organization itself is toughening).
The particles in question here are invisible to the naked eye — but their effects are anything but.
The public health threat of particulate matter
This problem goes by a lot of different names — “air pollution,” “low air quality,” “PM 2.5 pollution” — but it is directly tied to our climate problem.
Burning fossil fuels, in a car or steel mill or power plant, produces carbon dioxide and methane, but it also produces other pollutants. The term “PM 2.5” refers to particles smaller than 2.5 microns (or 0.0025 millimeters — tinier than a grain of sand) suspended in the air. Sometimes colloquially called “soot,” PM 2.5 usually comes from burning stuff: wood in fireplaces, propane in generators, coal in power plants, and gasoline in cars.
But PM 2.5 pollution doesn’t just emanate from controlled combustion. Fossil fuels also contribute to PM 2.5 emissions indirectly: Global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires, which subject people to huge quantities of particulate matter. The largest wildfire in California’s history, the Camp Fire of 2018, led PM 2.5 levels in the nearby city of Chico to increase by about 12 times the EPA limit.
This all matters because PM 2.5 emissions are extremely deadly. Because PM 2.5 particles are so small, they can easily reach the lungs and even the bloodstream, and long-term exposure can cause a variety of serious health problems, like lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, heart attacks, and cognitive decline.
And we have very good causal evidence that high levels of exposure to PM 2.5 pollution lead to a decline in overall health and life expectancy. Some of the early convincing evidence came from the US, particularly an influential “Six Cities Study” released in 1993. That study found significant relationships between levels of air pollution and overall mortality, driven by higher rates of lung cancer and other lung diseases and heart disease.
A more recent and methodologically strong set of research has focused on China, specifically its “Huai River policy” instituted in the 1950s. The Chinese Communist government had promised free heating in wintertime as a new state- provided benefit, but lacked the resources to offer the benefit nationally. Instead, it only gave free or heavily subsidized coal for heating to households north of the Huai River. The Huai roughly bisects eastern China; Beijing is several hundred miles to its north, and Shanghai slightly to its south.
That meant communities north of the river were exposed to much more particulate pollution from burning coal than communities to the south. Retrospective work comparing lifespans above and below the Huai River suggested that these emissions were incredibly deadly, directly reducing life expectancy by five and a half years for people north of the river compared to those living south of it.
Air pollution is costing millions of lives — and more
Worldwide pollution isn’t quite as bad as it was north of the Huai, but it’s not great either. The University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index, which regularly estimates the human toll of particulate pollution, this fall issued a report estimating that the average person on Earth loses 2.2 years of life expectancy due to particulate pollution, compared to a scenario in which every country followed WHO guidelines.
“Alcohol use reduces life expectancy by 9 months; unsafe water and sanitation, 7 months; HIV/AIDS, 4 months; malaria, 3 months; and conflict and terrorism, just 7 days,” researchers Ken Lee and Michael Greenstone write in the report. “Thus, the impact of particulate pollution on life expectancy is comparable to that of smoking, almost three times that of alcohol and drug use and unsafe water, five times that of HIV/AIDS, and 114 times that of conflict and terrorism.” By their count, lowering air pollution levels below those specified in WHO guidelines would enable people currently alive to enjoy 17 billion more years on Earth, collectively.
And that’s a relatively conservative figure. Shortly after the report’s release, the World Health Organization set stricter guidelines for particulate pollution. Its prior standard, undergirding the UChicago analysis, was that particulate concentration in the air we breathe should be kept to under 10 micrograms (µg, or a millionth of a gram) per cubic meter of air. The new threshold, developed due to evidence that even lower concentrations can be harmful to human health, is half that: 5 µg/m³.
Cutting global air pollution down to that new, lower threshold would save even more millions of life-years.
And the harms of particulate pollution are not limited to life expectancy. Patrick Collison, the entrepreneur and cofounder of Stripe, has taken a research interest in this topic and has a useful compendium of recent work on air pollution harms. Among the studies he highlights:
- A very small increase in particulate pollution (specifically an increase in PM 2.5 concentration of 1µg/m³) causes, by one estimate, a 0.8 percent reduction in GDP that year, mostly because air pollution increases absenteeism and reduces productivity.
- Alzheimer’s diagnoses triple when long- term air pollution exposure is substantially increased (by 10 µg/m³). Parkinson’s and dementia diagnoses increase too.
- Air pollution reduces cognitive functioning in young people. Applying US air pollution standards to China would substantially raise test scores on both reading and math in the latter country, from the median to the 63rd and 58th percentiles respectively.
- Chess players, baseball umpires, and stock traders all perform worse at their jobs when exposed to more air pollution. Those jobs are unusually easy to quantify, but it stands to reason that people’s performance at other jobs suffers too.
Even if air pollution doesn’t kill you, it probably impedes your cognitive functioning, makes you poorer, and increases your susceptibility to brutal diseases like Alzheimer’s.
How combating climate change can extend life expectancy
Air pollution is a tough problem, but the good news is that we can help solve it by solving another tough problem. Actions to combat global warming can also dramatically cut air pollution deaths.
In 2018, a team of earth scientists at Duke and Columbia universities modeled what would happen to air pollution deaths if the world actually acted to confront climate change. They considered a scenario where 180 fewer gigatons of CO2 are emitted by 2100. That’s roughly the reductions needed to keep warming to 2ºC or below — the goal of the Paris climate agreement.
If we reduce emissions that much, we would prevent about 110 million to 196 million premature deaths by 2100. Averaged over the 80-year period the paper considers, that’s 1.4 million to 2.5 million deaths per year averted. (The improvements would need time to take effect, so more lives would be saved later in the century than in the next 10 years or so.)
The good news is that governments have regulatory levers for reducing air pollution deaths — and some are pulling them. The UChicago Air Quality Life Index report estimates that since 2013, China has reduced air pollution by 29 percent, for an average lifespan extension of 1.5 years for each of its citizens (assuming there’s no backsliding on pollution).
The passage of a stronger version of the Clean Air Act in the US, similarly, was followed by a 50 percent reduction in particulate pollution between 1970 and 1979, aided by a slow economy. Economists Kenneth Chay and Michael Greenstone have estimated that the Clean Air Act caused an immediate and sharp decline in infant mortality in the US. By their figures, some 1,300 fewer infants died in 1972 than would have if the Clean Air Act amendments of 1970 hadn’t passed. What’s more, research from economists Adam Isen, Maya Rossin-Slater, and W. Reed Walker suggests that the Clean Air Act amendments led children to have higher earnings as adults than they would have had if they’d been exposed to prior levels of pollution.
There are also things you can do at an individual level to mitigate your air pollution intake. My colleague Rebecca Leber wrote about a tool that lets you investigate air quality where you live, and you can help prevent emissions from harming yourself or your loved ones with an electric air purifier (I have two running in my apartment).
But air pollution is not an individual problem, any more than climate change is. The long-term solutions involve setting much stricter regulations or higher taxes targeting particulate emissions, and replacing common sources like coal plants with solar, nuclear, or wind power.
The Biden administration is moving in the right direction. The Environmental Protection Agency, under Biden’s appointee Michael Regan, is reviewing its air quality standards, last reevaluated in 2012, in response to “the strong body of scientific evidence [which] shows that long- and short-term exposures to fine particles (PM2.5) can harm people’s health, leading to heart attacks, asthma attacks, and premature death.” A scientific panel at the EPA has signaled support for lowering the amount of PM 2.5 allowed in the air by as much as a third.
But this is also a global problem that hits the developing world even harder. Spreading green tech to emerging economies like India and Brazil is not just a climate necessity. It’s a public health necessity too.
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