To be fair, I did not disengage from this comment string, so I’ll give one last response.

The reason I say this conversation is unproductive is because you regularly take the least-charitable interpretation of what I say, like when you falsely claim I said ending famine was “purely a result of their economic system.” This kind of bad-faith and dishonest argumentative style makes any kind of productive conversation difficult, except that it exposes the kind of bad-faith argumentative style you have in general to more people.

To directly compare the United States at the turn of the 20th century, a developing Capitalist power that had already been the beneficiary of centuries of slavery and settler-colonialism, and the genocide that comes with them, to Russia emerging from a backwards, largely agrarian and underdeveloped feudal system, and China, a backwards, agrarian country which was coming from a century of colonization and eventually decades of Civil War, requires more than a little critical analysis. A better comparison would be to countries that had similar levels of development and went the Capitalist road, not the emerging superpower.

With the above clarification in mind, why did life expectancy grow in the US over that time period, and why did it grow in Russia and China? In the case of the US, it had a long period of peace, no wars on its lands, had industrialized and become a rising global power, and a new Empire, plundering the rest of the Americas. This rise in total wealth, combined with FDR’s expansion in Social Safety Nets as a measure to protect against rising Left-wing organization (a process Western Europe would also follow, in an attempt to provide what the USSR was providing in the form of Social Services so as to not have a copycat revolution), led to the rise of life expectancy. Medicine improved, as did technology, as they always will with industrialization, yet the US required a far longer time in far more generous circumstances.

In Russia and China, we see constant sanctions, no colonies to plunder, and the brutal task of industrialization that led to a drop in life expectancy in Capitalist countries like Britain. Technology and science weren’t being freely shared with them, either, nor was medicine. Instead, much of the advancements from these countries were inwardly driven, through direct efforts to industrialize. They still faced problems, such as the 1930s famine in the USSR, and the Great Chinese Famine in China (the drop you keep pretending I am unaware of as you pretend my point about ending famine is that Russia and China pushed the Socialism button and all famine was immediately gone).

However, the process of industrialization in these countries was focused on the working class, not on private business, and as a consequence we see large rises in life expectancy at a far faster rate and without the usual drop in Capitalist countries that even managed to avoid famine, like the British Empire, whose working class often had life expectancies in the 20s during its industrialization. Socialism was important because it allowed industrialization in a faster time period without the extreme excesses or even outright slavery in Capitalist countries, all without the tools of Imperialism employed by Western Europe and the US (as well as Japan, later).

I think there could have been an opportunity to have an actual discussion with you, but your insistence on making up claims of mine I have never made and your permanent bad-faith readings of my comments made that impossible, and unproductive. From moving the goalposts constantly (such as dropping the question of Imperialism when you tried to make it about landmass, and not Imperialism itself as an economic process) to the bad-faith readings, there’s really nothing productive here, unless you count the internet points you get from misrepresenting my points to your right-wing pals on MWoG (from someone who made a post about bullying on the fediverse, no less).

And with that, I disengage.