The Core

They ate less in plague-times, i wonder if that could account for the longevity.

There are so many potentially conflating factors here.

1. Europe came out of the Medieval Warm Period in the latter part of the 13thC. The population boom that was supported by 250 years of "good" weather, was undercut as the climate got colder and wetter. Large swaths of marginal land at both high latitudes and high altitudes became unproductive. Europe had not had a major famine in over a century when famine reappeared in the early 14th C. So the plague hit a population that had stretched resources beyond the carrying capacity. The same disease might have had a very different effect if it had hit in 1200. In the sixteenth century, there were still places that had been chic getaway locations before the plague that were still abandoned. I believe population took two centuries to bounce back.

2. Even land that was simply less good, not due to altitude or latitude, also passed out of production.

3. The economic effects of the Black Death are still much debated, but some believe that it led to a golden age of peasantry. There was a deflationary pressure on grain because of less demand and, again, only the best land still being in use. Meanwhile, peasants were able to renegotiate leases because so many other tenants had died. Finally, some believe there was also a wealth effect. For generations, families had been splitting holdings, especially in regions that did not practice primogeniture. That meant holdings that were often insufficient for a family. But as branches of families died out, those who were left had a much stronger position. Finally, some also believe that the wealth effect from inheritance in urban and artisanal families, led to a market in luxury goods that fueled a more robust economy.

4. 14thC demographics are extremely difficult. I don't know the techniques she uses and maybe they surmount some of the problems, but wide-scale demographics using population-level data (i.e. entire cities) don't really become possible until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. To do any real analysis of life expectancy in Europe, you need death and baptismal records, which are rare before the mid-sixteenth century.

 ... can't print enough money to bring dead people back to life, either.

A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work - POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/27/older-americans-work-coronavirus-151240?cid=apn

A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work - POLITICO

“Satan prefers sentimental humanists,” he wrote, and called the mass shutdown of New York City a sign that political and religious leaders had “signal[ed] by their actions that they, too, accept death’s dominion.”

In leftist circles, every time poor people vote Republican, there is always a cry that they are voting against their own interests.

I sort of feel like we're seeing the opposite now. The Trump demographic is the one most at risk of dying from the policies of these "conservatives" (totally the wrong word for any definition of conservatism I grew up with) governors and officials and pundits and cranks.

Well, yes, it is that.

But I mean that instead of rank and file voters acting against their own interest by voting for politicians who, for example, will work to weaken worker protections and have corporations recognized as people, now you have right-wing politicians actively hampering efforts to protect the cranky old white people who vote for them.

So it's like it's inverted. The politicians are working against their own interest by taking actions that contribute to the spread of a disease that targets above all their core voting demographic.

So in states like Florida, which is a swing state, if I were a Republican governor, I would not be doing anything at all to disaffect or *kill* the old white folks in my state. And yet....

It's not all those liberal kids at the beach that are going to die...