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Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

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Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#111

Post by nradov »

maartenscholl wrote: post #108
defrost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any particular reason US citizens are having so many fatal injuries at a young age though? Is the accident rate higher than (say) Canada and Australia, or is the prognosis for recovery after an injury so much worse? Here in Australia in my youth we jumped out of aircraft and helicopters, from one moving vehicle into another on dirt roads, jumped 40 ft off of deep water jetties into shark infested waters, climbed into…

Firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the US. That is not the case in other wealthy countries. According to this article https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...

Some of their metrics include adults ages 18-19, not just children. Still a serious problem, but the headline is deceptive.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#113

Post by maartenscholl »

nradov wrote: post #111
maartenscholl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the US. That is not the case in other wealthy countries. According to this article https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...

Some of their metrics include adults ages 18-19, not just children. Still a serious problem, but the headline is deceptive.

How is the headline deceptive? If you can trust the source, the statistic holds for individuals aged 1-17, as is written in the first sentence: "In 2020 and 2021, firearms contributed to the deaths of more children ages 1-17 years in the U.S. than any other type of injury or illness"

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#114

Post by defrost »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #109
defrost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any particular reason US citizens are having so many fatal injuries at a young age though? Is the accident rate higher than (say) Canada and Australia, or is the prognosis for recovery after an injury so much worse? Here in Australia in my youth we jumped out of aircraft and helicopters, from one moving vehicle into another on dirt roads, jumped 40 ft off of deep water jetties into shark infested waters, climbed into…

One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles. There are a bunch of historical and cultural reasons for this mostly related to agriculture, but you could get permits at age 14 and I seem to recall people driving as young as 12 in restricted agricultural contexts when I was growing up. Most start at 15-16. They also tend to do stupid things in cars when…

> One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles.

Australia is kind of big and kind of sparse (check map) and has cars; I live in a state 3x larger than Texas and drove 40 km to high school 5 days a week (and back again in the afternoon), and travelled > 1,000 km to reach the nearest university.

It's true that USofA citizens have more fatalities per driver mile which does prompt a 'why?' - poor signage, no seatbelts, chronic attention deficit ??

Indigenous Australians haver lower life expectancy and higher fatalities at younger ages.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#115

Post by nradov »

rgmerk wrote: post #51
atleastoptimal wrote: post #4

What precisely is causing Americans to die so much earlier than Europeans? I know obesity, healthcare access and gun violence play a factor, but is there anything else?

This thread (and the accompanying article) are very informative (and damning): https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?... Drugs and road accidents are other disproportionate contributors to the US's awful life expectancy. At the risk of being a wiseass, at least some of this is Americans taking Ben Franklin's aphorism about liberty and safety far too seriously. Sometimes, trading some liberty for…

"For Americans age 18-45, the leading cause of death is fentanyl overdose."

https://www.getsmartaboutdrugs.gov/media/dea-administrator-r...

That is a sad situation, but giving up more liberty won't save those people. Freedom is more important than safety and I have no interest in living under an authoritarian police state.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#116

Post by maartenscholl »

pseudo0 wrote: post #110
maartenscholl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the US. That is not the case in other wealthy countries. According to this article https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...

Fentanyl makes a much larger impact. There were around 14,000 non-suicide firearm deaths in 2018, the most recent year with stats. Fentanyl killed around 110,000 in 2022. Both issues disproportionately affect small segments of the population though, rather than being general hazards. Driving deaths for example tend to be more evenly distributed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_S... https://…

I think we get an apparent contradiction because of how we stratify the data. According to the CDC/KFF study, firearms are still the leading cause of death for people age 1-19, and substance use is only 6th in the list for that age group. If you instead interpret "young age" as another age range, then indeed other causes of death may appear more prevalent.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#117

Post by Ekaros »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #4

What precisely is causing Americans to die so much earlier than Europeans? I know obesity, healthcare access and gun violence play a factor, but is there anything else?

Preventative health care on average.

Europe might not be always great, but at least people aren't afraid to go to doctor early before things become too major.

And it can really add years to life for lot of people.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#118

Post by jandrewrogers »

defrost wrote: post #114
jandrewrogers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles. There are a bunch of historical and cultural reasons for this mostly related to agriculture, but you could get permits at age 14 and I seem to recall people driving as young as 12 in restricted agricultural contexts when I was growing up. Most start at 15-16. They also tend to do stupid things in cars when…

> One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles. Australia is kind of big and kind of sparse (check map) and has cars; I live in a state 3x larger than Texas and drove 40 km to high school 5 days a week (and back again in the afternoon), and travelled > 1,000 km to reach the nearest university. It's true that USofA citizens have more fatalities per driv…

It is a good question, I don’t have answers without digging in further. It isn’t signage or seatbelts. I don’t want to project when I was young on the situation today. Things were extremely “adventurous” when I was growing up, it is a wonder any of us survived (and some didn’t). With all the helicopter parenting now, at least in the middle to upper-middle class, you might expect that to be reduced but I have no idea.

The rate of fatal injuries are definitely still an anomalous thing for young people in the US.

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#119

Post by viknesh »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #106
viknesh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it varies considerably by income, location, and whether you do drugs It's not even that complicated - if you've lived to age 54, you've already lived long enough to not die for the first 54 years and so your life expectancy is higher than the default "no info" value of 73 years old. According to https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html , you have an expected 25 years left.

Mildly interesting: If lifetimes were exponentially distributed (they're not, of course), they'd have a well defined mean, but your future life expectancy would never change. If the mean were 90 years old, and you were 102, you could still expect another 90 years. I bring this up because it's sort of the extreme spherical cow version of what you're saying.

Neat fact! I guess that's basically Martingales for life expectancy?

Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study

#120

Post by [deleted] »

lgleason wrote: post #76

Anecdotally with my family and some family friends the men have outlived the women in more recent years. My sister was dead at 50, my mother died 10 years before my father, four close family friends outlived their wives, my wifes father outlived her mother etc.. I know very few where the wives outlived the husbands. Obviously the stats tell a different story across society, but I found this interesting.

[deleted]
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