Life expectancy

[Hot Pepsi]

Here's an investigation into why American life-expectancy has dropped off a cliff in the last five to ten years relative to other rich countries, even though we're richer than the other rich countries.

Because freedumb.

Life expectancy of older people 70+ is about the same as it has been for a long time.

The difference in death risk is all in younger people.

Factors include the big differences in guns, suicide, synthetic opioids, traffic accidents, diet, and health care. Built environment has a noticeable impact on some of those, but those aren't new so they can't really explain the drop off.

We have a much bigger gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas than Europe does.
And, somehow, immigrants to the US seem to live longer than anyone.

And we have very good results in specific health care areas where the politics have created good policies, like prostate cancer screening.

https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-...d-c34a0b774303

Here's a podcast on the same report.
https://www.theringer.com/2023/4/11/...ch-country-why

[WOM]

That's not a free link, unfortunately.

[Nocturnal Submission]

That's not a free link, unfortunately.

Try doing a free text search for the article's title.

[ursus arctos]

Text minus the graphs, which can be seen on Burn Murdoch's Twitter feed (and elsewhere)

I’m not sure people on my side of the Atlantic fully appreciate quite how much better off the average American is than the average European. A car-wash manager in Alabama can now earn $125,000, about 50 per cent more than the head of cyber security at the UK Treasury even after accounting for different living costs. And this isn’t just another reflection of British stagnation — from the middle of the income distribution upwards, US households have streaked ahead of every country in the developed world over the past decade.

Such a sustained boom in spending power might, you would imagine, be accompanied by improvements in other indicators of prosperity. Longer and healthier lives, for example. But the two trends are moving in opposite directions. That the US has a poor record on life expectancy is nothing new. For the best part of a decade, American lives have grown progressively shorter relative to peer countries. But beneath the surface, several striking details demand our attention and an urgent effort to reverse the trend.

American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.

This means that the average American has the same chance of a long and healthy life as someone born in the most deprived town in England. If you then explore how life expectancy varies across the income distribution in both countries, the results are not pretty. This is especially alarming when you consider that the UK is far from top of the class when it comes to life expectancy in Europe.

While Americans and Britons living in the richest neighbourhoods of their respective countries have similar, high life expectancies, at the bottom end it’s a different story. People born in the very poorest pockets of Blackpool are expected to live fully five years more than the poorest in the US. This would be damning enough, but we’ve not yet accounted for the fact that the richest Americans are so much richer than their British counterparts. Once we do, Britain pulls clear at every income level. Someone with a net household income of about £65,000 or $100,000 will live to an average age of 85 in England, but only 80 in the US.

What is causing these gaps? Shockingly, America’s mortality problem is driven primarily by deaths among the young. One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will

And this is a very American problem. These young deaths are caused overwhelmingly by external causes — overdoses, gun violence, dangerous driving and such — which are deeply embedded social problems involving groups with opposing interests. Far trickier to tackle than most health issues where everyone is pulling in one direction.

Almost every country in the world took a mortality hit during the pandemic. Developed nations for the most part are bouncing back, but the US is not. If Covid-19 had never happened, life expectancy in other developed countries would have remained flat or increased, but the US would still have lost a year due to the surge in violent deaths. By my calculations, Americans lost 9.4 million years of life to external causes in 2021 alone, more than the 9.1mn lost to Covid over the course of the entire pandemic. And these deaths continue to rise.

The past three years have stretched social ties and tested safety nets everywhere and the US has been found wanting. But the underlying factors reveal a longer-term story of a hidden cost in life expectancy across the income groups. And the highest price is being paid in avoidable deaths among the young, the poor and the vulnerable.

.

[ad hoc]

As an aside, I have recently been introduced to this site that seems to be a good way to get past paywalls https://12ft.io/


Though having said that, with this site it only works if you are prepared to live with the "cookies" notice (if you click to accept the page changes)

[Hot Pepsi]

That's not a free link, unfortunately.

Really? I accessed it and I don't pay.

The Ringer podcast is free and covers the main points.


It's remarkable, but I don't know if the anecdote about an Alabama car wash manager making twice as much as the head of the UK Treasury's cybersecurity is the best illustration. I doubt many Alabama car wash managers make that much - or if they do, it's a huge car wash and/or money-laundering operation - and the UK really needs to be paying important staff a lot more than that. That's more about the particularly bad management of the current government rather than the UK economy as a whole, although they aren't unrelated.


Speaking of freedumb, check out this gem.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cq8Rk..._web_copy_link

[ursus arctos]

It seems to default to the home page of the site if one clicks either "Accept" or "Manage" on the Cookies pop up, so one has to do one's best to read around that (the difficulty of doing so varies by site).

I found the description of why the developer built the site and how it works to be interesting.

Why?


I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.

You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. This is why I created 12ft.io.
How does it work?


The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.