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

economist.com

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

#111

Post by dragonwriter »

majormajor wrote: post #87
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could shift the low-demand graduates to high-demand graduates with somewhat decreased cost, in theory, by simply axing two thirds of the low-demand programs, no? By what mechanism would you do this? It's not as if there is a centralized bureau of programs for all universities. In theory you could stop offering student loans to students studying low demand subjects, but we haven't actually done that. > If the dem…

Yes, I think loan policy changes are our most practical knob to turn, as I think many of the current problems are the result of making college too apparently cheap with easy loans and deferred payments. Cracking down on for-profit colleges is a good first step, even though we've somewhat slowed down on that lately. I'd favor a less prescriptive method around "study this, not that" and a more responsive one: your loan…

> Emerging industries can't work like this - someone has to do the work before the universities catch up

Often, in fields that are just emerging into commercial viability, the people doing the new work before it gets taught in universities or commercially applied are researchers at universities (professors leading, but graduate students often doing the heavy lifting and often undergraduates working in supporting roles), who are then also (both via publication and personal contact and advisory councils) taking it to industry to further development.

So, yeah, while someone is doing work before university classroom instruction catches up, a lot of that advance work is done in universities, across the whole professor-to-undergraduate academic heirarchy.

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

#112

Post by hueving »

quietmonkey wrote: post #85
matte_black wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why this is a big deal. We already serve up content based on people similar to you or making similar choices as you, why not health forecasts? If I eat healthy, exercise, get the proper amount of sleep and am not addicted to drugs, why not show me how other people with similar habits as me are doing, instead of averaging in people who treat their body like a dumpster? Showing me the life expectancy averag…

Even if you are drug-free now, you could have a procedure in couple years and become addicted to opioids during recovery. Many people who are suffering from the opioid epidemic were prescribed these drugs.

But that's even more reason to split out the stats. It would be very good to know that the average life expectancy for opioid users is much lower before I consider taking them.

Life expectancy if you get the surgery and medicate with pot: 80 years.

Life expectancy if you get the surgery and use the opioids: 60 years.

That seems immeasurably more useful than a national average alone which only can be used for political talking points.

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

#113

Post by hueving »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
matte_black wrote: post #9

Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”? Seems like that would be a more meaningful metric for an individual, rather than lumping them in with every drug addict.

> Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”? Sure, to some degree of similarity, if you want to spend effort analyzing the multidimensional demographic and other factors in mortality data; there's very little public policy value in that, so the public organizations that compile public health information to support policy aren't likely to package that up for you, though.

>there's very little public policy value in that

That's incredibly myopic and would point to a massively flawed system if that's true. It's incredibly valuable for public policy on both ends of the political spectrum to know if certain demographics are dying much sooner than others.

A single national average is about as useless as you can get unless your goal is to bemoan the decline of the US or highlight how much better one nation is than another.

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

#114

Post by existencebox »

rayiner wrote: post #43
forapurpose wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's large reductions in government programs, from health to education to food and welfare programs for the poor. I don't have data, but it's hard to believe that such programs have no effect. Also, the U.S. moved on from being an industrial economy decades ago, long before most people realize. In Detroit, for example, auto industry jobs began declining in the 1950s.

Has there been a net decrease in these programs since 2008? I think the opposite is true.

I was curious, so I tried to answer this question. Problem being, detangling the cause/effect and interactions of e.g. employment with food stamps isn't immediately obvious to me. To give some of the examples I was looking at:

Overall, social security and disability spending per capita, and overall enrollment, is up. (at a very high rate since the 90s, comparatively to prior).[0]

However, out of pocket costs and private insurance costs have been increasing at even higher rates [1]

To look at food stamps, SNAP participation has been going down rather significantly in recent years.[2] It's an open question as to the relative contributions of increased employment rates vs. changes to eligibility (often via republican states imposing work requirements), let alone normalizing this against the various unemployment/"workforce participation" measures to find the "real rate" of unemployed, un-protected individuals, which has certainly not recovered since the recession [3]; implying that the SNAP cuts may not be from the "good signal" (employment is found) precondition.

Something that's not well captured in the above (chosen because they were a few "notable social programs" I could think about off the cuff) and someone more informed than I could likely tell me what the core metric for this would be; but there's an worrying pattern I keep hearing about regarding schools pushing for a four day school week. (here's an analysis showing the motivation of cost cutting, and the unfortunately lacking results [4]) If the implied need to cut costs is _that severe_, for whatever reason (my assumption would be a combination of state funding and taxbase) one can reasonably see this as another eroding facet of state/social support, if not necessarily intentionally.

All in all; I get the feeling that while local benefit cuts (and more importantly aspects such as increased out of pocket costs for healthcare) are probably not helping, it's only one aggravating facet along the side of a core deeper systemic trend(s).

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-part... [3] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf

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

#115

Post by dragonwriter »

hueving wrote: post #112
quietmonkey wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you are drug-free now, you could have a procedure in couple years and become addicted to opioids during recovery. Many people who are suffering from the opioid epidemic were prescribed these drugs.

But that's even more reason to split out the stats. It would be very good to know that the average life expectancy for opioid users is much lower before I consider taking them. Life expectancy if you get the surgery and medicate with pot: 80 years. Life expectancy if you get the surgery and use the opioids: 60 years. That seems immeasurably more useful than a national average alone which only can be used for politica…

That's not a matter of splitting out stats, because the information gathered doesn't support that. That kind of research does get done, but it's expensive, time consuming, and only really possible when alternatives have been fairly widely applied for enough years to have good data to support meaningful analysis of expected lifetime (and may still, even then, be misleading I'd treatment protols for either drug have evolved significantly over the period.)

So you won't find them for all the options of interest, and you emphatically won't find them for emerging options (including pot, which hasn't been even quasi-legal long enough to support good data.)

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

#118

Post by hueving »

pasquinelli wrote: post #19
matte_black wrote: post #9

Is there a way to measure “Life expectancy of people most similar to you”? Seems like that would be a more meaningful metric for an individual, rather than lumping them in with every drug addict.

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

When it comes to health 'us, America' is so incredibly diverse in behavior that it's nearly meaningless.

We can have a medical break through that lets us revive stroke victims as brain dead patients that live for years in beds. Simultaneously we can have a smaller opioid epidemic that kills fewer people than the stroke victims and makes way more addicts. Average life expectancy increased, but who really gives a crap in that case?

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

#119

Post by forapurpose »

volkl48 wrote: post #98
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…

Your first point is misleading. As birthrates fluctuate (ex: "the baby boom" was a high point), so do the number of people who can potentially be starting college in a given year (at the traditional age). The next few years of Americans to turn 18 are smaller than the year before them. If the likelihood of Americans to go to college remains similar, domestic student populations will decline for reasons of demography,…

> If the likelihood of Americans to go to college remains similar

That's a problem. Prior generations became more educated than their predecessors, more able to understand the world, and did higher-skilled and better-paying work. Now, it's stagnated (or is going backward).

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

#120

Post by forapurpose »

rayiner wrote: post #96
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.

The underlying problem is that college is the wrong thing. College focuses on capital-E “Education.” Book learning, “big ideas,” and “learning to think.” What we need is training—teaching people the concrete skills they need for a job. That’s true even in majors that are ostensibly directed to producing professionals. Engineering school often focuses too much on producing PhD candidates rather than practicing enginee…

> The underlying problem is that college is the wrong thing. College focuses on capital-E “Education.” Book learning, “big ideas,” and “learning to think.” What we need is training—teaching people the concrete skills they need for a job.

Can you back this up? It's a big statement. Even if it's commonplace, I don't think it's well thought through. Education is for far more than jobs: People have to be citizens, community members, parents, individuals, and more - they need to be able to understand and reason critically about the world.

I'll note that the world's major problems now are not a lack of software and science, it's a lack of critical thinking about the (mis)information they read, and lack of understanding of politics and public affairs. For example, we know about climate change; the science isn't the obstacle. We've developed Facebook; more technology isn't the need.

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