Americans are dying earlier than Europeans—and the rich are not exempt. 

In a new study published today, researchers at Brown University analyzed the survival rates and wealth of older adults in the U.S. and Europe over 12 years. They found that Americans’ survival rate was lower than their European counterparts across all wealth tiers. The wealthiest in Northern and Western Europe had a mortality rate roughly 35% lower than that of the wealthiest Americans.  

“Whatever is happening with mortality in the U.S. and these decreases that we see in life expectancy are not just things that are happening to the poorest Americans,” Irene Papanicolas, senior author of the study and a professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown School of Public Health, tells Fortune. “There’s something systemic that’s happening that affects every American.” 

In the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers used data from over 73,000 adults between the ages of 50 and 85 in the U.S. and 16 European countries. 

Despite socioeconomic privilege, the researchers found that the survival rate of the wealthiest bracket of Americans “was statistically equivalent to the poorest wealth quartile in North and Western Europe,” Papanicolas says. “So they’re not just doing worse than the richest quartile. They’re statistically equivalent to the poorest quartile in that region.”

Papanicolas hypothesizes that several of the European countries at play, like Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are high spenders on health care, but they address the social determinants that exacerbate the health and wealth gap more adequately than the U.S.

Wealth still equals better health

Despite the discrepancy for the wealthiest in the U.S., across the board, the study underscores that wealth impacts health. The richest have better survival rates than the poorest, explained by the ability to pay for out-of-pocket health care costs, access to safer living situations, and education that provides health literacy, says Papanicolas. 

But the study found that America’s health gap between the richest and poorest was most stark. The poorest Americans had the lowest survival rates of all the study participants. 

“Greater inequity might just make a lot of what we need for a healthy life inaccessible to more and more people,” she says. “For a country that spends so much more, we really should be doing more.” The researchers conclude that a mixture of culture, policy, and environment can influence how much wealth impacts health, which seems most notable in the U.S. 

“Across all wealth quartiles [in Europe], people were more likely to have a college education as compared to the U.S. where that was much more concentrated across the most wealthy. Even things like smoking, we saw that there was less of a social gradient than we saw in the U.S,” Papanicolas says. “In a lot of the European countries, the top three quartiles were much more clustered together, so it didn’t really seem to make that much of a difference. The poorest do worse everywhere, but the majority of people had a much more similar trajectory in Europe [than in the U.S.].” (The authors note that the sample size in Europe cannot be generalized across all European countries). 

Papanicolas notes that the paper does not conclude definitive causes for the results but does extrapolate on the potential systemic issues afflicting the U.S. survival rates. 

“As we think of policies to address this, we really need to think, what are these factors that are so prevalent that they’re influencing everybody but that in other countries aren’t?” Papanicolas says. 

Here are three reasons for shorter U.S. lifespans:  

Avoidable causes of death

In the U.S., external deaths, such as from firearms, alcohol, and suicide, were higher compared to other wealthy countries. 

“This points to a weaker public health infrastructure that isn’t protecting people, as well as other high-income countries are from these deaths,” says Papanicolas. “I think we really need to think about how we bolster public health and protect people.”

High rates of cardiovascular death

High rates of heart disease, a significant risk factor for early mortality, also plague the U.S more dramatically than other high-income countries. 

“We need to think about diagnosis and treatment and making sure that everybody has access to affordable medications and is able to prevent the risk factors that can lead to deaths from heart disease,” Papanicolas says. 

A weaker social state 

Compared to the U.S., Papanicolas says European countries “invest in, potentially, a more robust social state that protects you from the stress of losing your job.”

“Your healthcare isn’t attached necessarily to your employment, and you have, maybe with more equal access to education, also more equal opportunities to become wealthy throughout the life course,” she says.

Another flag for a weaker social state: The U.S. dropped to its lowest rank on the annual World Happiness Report last month. “All of these play a role in the population, not only in the short term, but particularly in the long term,” Papanicolas says.

The study points to an urgent priority: a public health strategy with a goal of equal access to aging well, just as the Trump admin is dismantling health agencies charged with offering services to older adults, from mental health care to access to healthy food.

“Look to other countries and understand what they do, because it is possible to achieve a better survival with less,” says Papanicolas. “There’s also potentially a note of hope here that we can do better.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When President Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, many in the financial industry cheered, excited by the prospect of tax cuts and a friendlier regulatory environment. So the last few months have taken many in the industry by surprise, as the Trump administration has pursued policies like far-reaching tariffs and trade wars that have markets falling and a recession looking increasingly likely.

David Solomon, CEO of investment bank Goldman Sachs, says the business community is now dealing with a ton of uncertainty. But once it receives some clarity from the Trump administration—which Solomon expects over the next six months—the economy should be able to steady.

“The U.S. economy is in relatively good shape. It’s a huge, diverse, powerful economic engine that is much harder to set off track today than it might have been 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Solomon said Tuesday. “But there’s enormous policy uncertainty.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Brittany Boals Moeller, Goldman’s region head for San Francisco private wealth management, Solomon touched on leadership, tariffs, and investor uncertainty.

The discussion was part of the Rising Leaders Forum, an invitation-only gathering for 20- and 30-something investors held by Goldman Sachs and New York City philanthropic organization Robin Hood. Other speakers throughout the day’s events included Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Barry Sternlicht, co-founder and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, and basketball phenom Caitlin Clark.

Solomon reflected on his decades-long relationship with Robin Hood, telling attendees, which included around 150 entrepreneurs, startup founders, and wealth inheritors, that it’s imperative for them to start thinking about their legacies and how to build a better world. To that end, panels and informational sessions held throughout the day educated the professionals on maximizing their philanthropic impact.

This is the second year that Goldman has hosted the forum with Robin Hood. The event provides clients with information they need to think about their philanthropic efforts, but also paves a way for the next generation of ultra high-net worth investors and business leaders to make connections, says Goldman’s Boals Moeller.

Robin Hood’s goal is to get younger investors and philanthropists thinking about ways to get involved with and better their city, which the Rising Leaders Forum allows for, says CEO Richard Buery, Jr.

“It’s about getting people to focus, getting people to think about what it means for them and their futures if … this is not a place where everybody truly has the chance to succeed,” he says. “I don’t think that’s a hard pitch.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which has remained on the New York Times bestseller list since it was published one year ago. 

“It has struck a chord,” said Ezra Klein Show host Ezra Klein on Tuesday’s episode of the podcast, which featured Haidt as a guest for an hour-and-13-minute discussion on the endless parenting struggle of trying to keep kids off screens.

The wide-ranging interview expounded upon Haidt’s four golden rules for curbing screen use—no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, far more unsupervised play and independence for kids, and phone-free schools—and celebrated the fact that the last recommendation, about schools, is seeing some traction in various states. 

But he also, in speaking with Klein, expanded on his four rules, warning that “modern parenting” appears to be hurting, not helping, the cause. Below, three of his most urgent messages to parents.

Stop spending so much time with your kids

Yes, you read that right. According to Haidt, the importance of “quality time” is a myth, and in fact does your child a disservice. He discussed this within the context of his rule about kids needing more unsupervised play, which is something too much screen time—as well as an omnipresent parent—robs. 

“It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks,” Haidt explained. He noted that, in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, “women were not spending five hours a day parenting,” because kids were more often left to their own devices—playing and roaming for hours at a time with other kids, the younger ones learning from the older ones.

“Everyone before the millennials had this childhood,” he said, noting that it shifted in the 1990s, when fears of abduction and the like took over. 

“But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base—they’re your attachment figure,” Haidt continued. “When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore…and that’s where the learning happens.”

It’s why, he added, “modern parenting is not good for the kids—and certainly not good for the adults,” particularly moms, who tend to bear the brunt of round-the-clock parenting.

But, Klein asked, what about the widely-held belief that spending lots of quality time with your kids is what makes a good parent?

“It’s definitely not true,” Haidt said. “You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid. You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline.”

Too much time with a parent, he stressed, “is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there.”

Understand that ‘the iPad is not like TV’

Something Haidt really wants parents to comprehend, he said, “is that the iPad is not like TV. TV is a good way of entertainment. TV puts out a story. But a touch screen is a behaviorist training device.”

When using a touch screen, he explained, “you get a stimulus, you make a response and then you get a reward, which gives you a little bit of dopamine and makes you want to do it again and again and again.” It can basically “train your child the way a circus trainer can train an animal,” he added. “So iPad or iPhone time for your 3-, 4- or 5-year-old is just not a good thing.” 

Still, there are ways that parents can distinguish between “a pretty good use of screens and a really bad use of screens.”

A pretty good use, Haidt said, is to put on a movie that’s at least 90 minutes long. That way, “they’re going to pay attention to a long movie about characters in a moral universe. There are issues of good and bad and norms and betrayal. It’s part of their moral training, their moral formation.” And ideally, he added, they’ll be watching it with another person—hopefully a parent, but a sibling or friend is also OK, he said, “because it’s social.”

By contrast, he noted, “Here’s what’s really bad: iPad time by yourself,” specifically YouTube. “Because that’s exactly the opposite. It’s solitary. They’re not consuming stories—or, if they are, they are 15 seconds long and either amoral or really immoral—disgusting, degrading things, people doing terrible things to each other.”

That does a number on attention span, Klein added, who recalled finding the “endlessness of YouTube” to be “terrifying” when his kids were little. “My kids would never even watch a full thing, because they were always hitting the next thing under it. Because there’s always something more interesting.”

Assume the worst about AI

Haidt feels certain that 2025 is the year regulators and parents and anyone else with an interest in protecting kids from screens need to “move quickly,” he explained. “This is really our last year before A.I. really has a big impact on life.”

That’s because society is moving “from the idea that A.I. enables you to know everything” to the idea that “A.I. allows you to do everything.” Now A.I. agents “are going to give us omnipotence,” he warned. “And that would be horrible for children.”

That includes the ability to create friends to your specific likings. 

“The way we adapt is by preventing kids from having these friendships,” he urged, referring to AI chatbot relationships—such as the romantic one that led to the suicide of a 14-year-old last year. 

“I think we have to stop. This is not even about the content. We have to stop saying: Oh, we just need better content moderation. No, we don’t,” he said. “We need to realize kids have to go through a childhood in the real world with other kids within a moral universe where they experience the consequences of their own actions. And they have to learn how to deal with real people who are frustrating.”

If we give our kids A.I. companions that they can order around and will always flatter them, he continued, “we are creating people who no one will want to employ or marry. So we’ve got to stop.” 

Haidt is hopeful that it’s not too late to put the genie back in the bottle—because unlike social media, AI is not yet fully enmeshed in our lives. 

“A.I. is not yet entangled. A.I. is just coming in,” he said. “And in two or three years it will be entangled.”

And what’s vital to remember before then, Haidt said, is that “Silicon Valley has a horrible track record at living up to its promises, especially for kids. They claimed that social media is going to connect everyone. No, it actually disconnected everyone.”

And while there are amazing uses for A.I., some of which Haidt appreciates, it’s important to understand that “children are not adults,” he said. “And given the track record so far, we have to assume that these A.I. companions will be very bad for our children.” So approach it with a skeptical eye, he advises. 

“Start by assuming it’s harming your kids,” he said, “and then you can bring in some uses where it’s not.”

More on screen time and kids:

• 68% of parents with children under 6 say their kids need a ‘detox’ from technology. Here’s why that’s scary, say experts
• TikTok introduces tighter controls for kids and teens—but experts still have a warning for parents
• Is teen social media use a crisis or moral panic?

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com