Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 188 posts

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#51

Post by majormajor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48
rayiner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first number is a good thing. We’re overeducated in the US.

> The first number is a good thing. We’re overeducated in the US. Is that even possible? It's not as if we're swimming in demand for unskilled labor at a living wage. The underlying problem seems to be that college (along with housing and healthcare) are too expensive and people can't afford them.

We do have a lot of relatively unskilled jobs that claim to require 4 year degrees, though.

Is college too expensive or is it over-required, or both? Even if it was free, that's a pretty substantial 4 year opportunity cost.

The other part, a drop in international students is something different, though. To conclude how damaging that is, we'd need to know how much of the cohort that dropped off would've otherwise stayed in the country, etc.

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#52

Post by phs318u »

matte_black wrote: post #22
pasquinelli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not about you, it's about us, america. if you want meaningful metrics for you, talk to your doctor.

It’s a vanity metric. Life expectancy gives no actionable information for anyone except for “move to another country”.

I'd suggest that there's an element of the the canary in the coalmine to this metric. As another commenter noted, it is much harder to fudge deaths vs employment. Hence greater believability and therefore triggers the question "why" in the broader populace.

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#53

Post by ddxxdd »

majormajor wrote: post #28
forapurpose wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lingering effects of the great recession Other countries went through the Great Recession, didn't recover as well as the U.S., and are not suffering from the problem. Also, the problem started in the last couple of years while the Great Recession began in 2008 (EDIT: and has since ended, with unemployment low for the last two years).

I'd say less the recession and more just a particularly-hard-hitting-in-America trend away from the country's historical industrial base. The 20th century US benefited massively from being on the front lines of modern industrialization and mass production, creating a ton of jobs especially in certain regions. And in areas that haven't been able to replace those jobs as the US economy becomes based in different areas…

I'll be more inclined to listen to diatribes about the inevitability of America's economic decline when we no longer have the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

Until then, I firmly place the blame of America's economic woes on one political party. Hint: it's the party of higher taxes.

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#54

Post by jackcnreturns »

forapurpose wrote: post #40
biohax2015 wrote: post #33

It’s very frustrating to watch America decline and not being able to do anything about it. Has democracy failed? Is it time for a rekindling of the study of comparative politics? It seems the Chinese have a viable solution to the problem of a largely uneducated and passive populace.

> It seems the Chinese have a viable solution Viable to whom? And who gets to decide? If the Chinese solution is so popular, why don't they hold an election? There is no legitimate government without democracy, without the people deciding who should govern them and how.

lol

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#55

Post by majormajor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49
forapurpose wrote: post #27

Other measures of human welfare that are declining in the U.S.: * "This year, the number of domestic undergraduate students dropped 224,000" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/international-enrollme... * If nothing is done, the number of Americans with health insurance is expected to decline by millions this year (due to the repeal of the health care tax (I forget the term they used) in the new tax law). * With CH…

> If nothing is done, the number of Americans with health insurance is expected to decline by millions this year (due to the repeal of the health care tax (I forget the term they used) in the new tax law). This is a bad metric. We should be worried about healthcare costs, not insurance coverage. You can have "universal coverage" and still be wrong, because people are paying $5000+/year in insurance premiums they can'…

> If it didn't cost a hundred thousand dollars to get sick then it wouldn't be a problem for people to not be insured against it.

This is a dicey one. One of the things that drives treatment costs up is more advanced technology. Should we go back to 70s/80s-era cancer treatments, HIV treatments, surgical outcomes?

We need a lot more national discussion about where the real opportunities to save money are, and what should and shouldn't be covered, and if there's a one-size-fits-all solution or not, because some of the costs will continue to trend upwards as we become more able to keep more people alive for longer (otherwise a good thing!). Some [surgeries, drugs, treatments] cost tens of thousands of dollars and save lives. Some cost tens of thousands of dollars with dubious outcomes. That's where the meat is.

But we have no hope whatsoever of getting there if we can't even agree that mandated health insurance at at least some minimum level is necessary policy. Insurance needs that much to be able to work at all. Or give me the reverse: if you opt out of health insurance when you're healthy, saying the sick can fend for themselves, then you don't ever get to opt back in. (That's not gonna happen, obviously.)

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#56

Post by majormajor »

ddxxdd wrote: post #53
majormajor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say less the recession and more just a particularly-hard-hitting-in-America trend away from the country's historical industrial base. The 20th century US benefited massively from being on the front lines of modern industrialization and mass production, creating a ton of jobs especially in certain regions. And in areas that haven't been able to replace those jobs as the US economy becomes based in different areas…

I'll be more inclined to listen to diatribes about the inevitability of America's economic decline when we no longer have the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Until then, I firmly place the blame of America's economic woes on one political party. Hint: it's the party of higher taxes.

Huh? America can be economically ascendant - we have a LOT of businesses doing quite well with massive profits and cash holdings, tax rates completely aside - without being dominant in every single industry. Regional drug addiction trends are NOT national economic issues (the national economy has been going up at the same time as the opiod abuse!), but plainly regional ones.

What specific parts of the opiod issue do you think a lower corporate tax rate will fix?

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#57

Post by make3 »

majormajor wrote: post #55
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If nothing is done, the number of Americans with health insurance is expected to decline by millions this year (due to the repeal of the health care tax (I forget the term they used) in the new tax law). This is a bad metric. We should be worried about healthcare costs, not insurance coverage. You can have "universal coverage" and still be wrong, because people are paying $5000+/year in insurance premiums they can'…

> If it didn't cost a hundred thousand dollars to get sick then it wouldn't be a problem for people to not be insured against it. This is a dicey one. One of the things that drives treatment costs up is more advanced technology. Should we go back to 70s/80s-era cancer treatments, HIV treatments, surgical outcomes? We need a lot more national discussion about where the real opportunities to save money are, and what sh…

there is no legitimate reason the us should be praying at least an order of magnitude more for the same treatments

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#58

Post by make3 »

biohax2015 wrote: post #33

It’s very frustrating to watch America decline and not being able to do anything about it. Has democracy failed? Is it time for a rekindling of the study of comparative politics? It seems the Chinese have a viable solution to the problem of a largely uneducated and passive populace.

blind plutocratic capitalism has failed, not democracy

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#59

Post by AnthonyMouse »

majormajor wrote: post #51
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first number is a good thing. We’re overeducated in the US. Is that even possible? It's not as if we're swimming in demand for unskilled labor at a living wage. The underlying problem seems to be that college (along with housing and healthcare) are too expensive and people can't afford them.

We do have a lot of relatively unskilled jobs that claim to require 4 year degrees, though. Is college too expensive or is it over-required, or both? Even if it was free, that's a pretty substantial 4 year opportunity cost. The other part, a drop in international students is something different, though. To conclude how damaging that is, we'd need to know how much of the cohort that dropped off would've otherwise stay…

> We do have a lot of relatively unskilled jobs that claim to require 4 year degrees, though.

This comes from misalignment of specialization. We have too many English majors and not enough physicians and engineers, and the English majors can't all find skilled employment.

That allows the unskilled employers to require a college degree, because the unemployed English majors will take an unskilled job over nothing, so the availability of degree-holding job seekers allows employers to use a degree as a filter to include only people who have demonstrated the ability to follow instructions and stick with something for multiple years.

But that doesn't mean we have too much education, it means we need to educate more people in things that are in higher demand rather than lower demand so they don't end up doing unskilled labor (and depriving actually-unskilled people of that work).

So we could do with fewer low-demand graduates, but we want all of them and more to instead become high-demand graduates, which means the cost still matters.

Re: Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

#60

Post by ajmurmann »

llamataboot wrote: post #5
refurb wrote: post #3

Life expectancy is a very blunt tool when measuring citizen's well being. A few ways life expectancy can go down: - babies that other would have died and not counted live long enough with modern medicine that they drag the average down - refugees or immigrants in poor health increase, dragging the average down - a change in methodology in how life expectancy is calculated

It may be blunt, but it's also pretty striking. Along most measures of wellbeing and health, the US lags behind most other industrialized countries.

It seems like it's not all states though. Funny enough the ones that are behind are also the ones that don't seem to want any welfare.
Post reply on HN