79.1 for women (all races), and 61.5 for black men, as of 2022, in the USA. Wow.
[dead]
Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
131–140 of 145 posts
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#132Lesser than in Cuba.
Capitalism kills.
Socialism is more productive, with more years of life expectancy with fewer resources.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think in US you do not need to attend driving school in order to get license. Is it same for Australia?
Depends on the state.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#134Earlier 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…
[deleted]
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#135For comparison, in Australia (population ~ 26.47 million): Life expectancy at birth was 81.2 years for males and 85.3 years for females in 2020-2022 https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/life-exp... In 2020, Australia recorded a lower than expected death rate as public health measures put in place to restrict the spread of COVID-19 also resulted in a reduction of deaths across a number of other causes.…
(I'm Australian) Despite the excess COVID deaths in 2022, the super aggressive Australian response to to COVID (closing borders until vaccines were available) worked really well in comparison to other countries. You can see this on [1] where Australia jumped from 14th in the world in 2019 to 8th in 2021 (sort by 2021 "all" in the first table). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I don't know if that makes much sense as an argument in itself.
I looked at the table and Sweden (where I live) we had a very opposite response to COVID than Australia and still saw an increase in life expectancy from 2014-2021, almost on par with Australia (0.9 for SWE, 1.0 for AUS). Sweden fared better than New Zealand which had a similar approach as Australia.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't read the underlying article, but that graph a minimum is not saying "2nd highest factor". It notes both drugs (lowers gap to 2.9) and metabolic diseases (lowers gap to 2.2) as both more of a factor than suicide & homicide (only lowers gap to 3.2). Which tracks, given that suicide is like 50k per year, homicide is 20k per year (unstated: "gun deaths" that aren't homicide or suicide are orders of magnitude lowe…
Oh I've read it the wrong way around! Yes you are correct!
Also it's unclear if there are other factors worth tracking, since the graph only lists a few.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disease (not including covid), accidents (which I suppose includes drug OD), Alzheimer's, and diabetes all have higher death rates that the combination of all suicide+homicide (which again, is sort of strange to join together). The first two alone are 600k+ each.
A bunch of those affect primarily the elderly though, so won't hit the average life expectancy as hard.
If you track homicide separately, it's not even in the top 20 of causes of death. Suicide is not in the top 10.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the first two - 0.01% of us die to guns, which isn't nothing - but not enough to move averages significantly. Maybe also cars? I assume Americans drive more than most other countries.
That’s per annum. The rate decreases by age, but over a lifetime the cumulative odds start to add up to a more significant number. Also, by killing men in their twenties it affects the average more than something like heart disease that usually kills men over 50.
> it affects the average more than something like heart disease that usually kills men over 50.
If you look at the linked Twitter thing in the other comment chain here, you will note that this is not true.
The numbers are just very different - heart disease (~600k) is like 40x more than all homicide (~15k, varies by year). Even if heart disease only kills people the year or two before they would otherwise die in their 70s (which is not true, it kills a lot of 50-yr-olds too), it would affect the average less than homicide.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#138At age 54, I'm now in the final quarter of my life. That assumption inspires me. It discourages procrastination, and encourages me to let go of plans that probably won't happen, since I'm almost out of time. “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ― Leonard Bernstein
The life expectancy distribution is not flat: it varies considerably by income, location, and whether you do drugs. It's also a mean, not a median, skewed by early deaths from suicide, drugs, etc. The point being: if you're already 54, earning a median HN salary and not doing drugs, you'll probably live to a lot longer than 73.
I used Bard to figure out what the life expectancy would be for someone like me who's an older, but otherwise "typical" HN-er and the result was 84 years, thus corroborating your point.
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's always interesting to me when people bring up Franklin in this context because the aphorism is usually completely misunderstood.
The audience and context was the colony of Pennsylvania deciding to accept an offer from the Penn family to provide a one-off detachment of mercenaries to patrol the colony's western border in exchange for a perpetual ban on taxing the Penn landholdings.
The safety was border defense. The liberty was the colonial government's authority to pass law. In context, Franklin is saying "The government that cedes its taxation authority over the citizens for a temporary boon from its richest citizens deserves neither the boon nor the authority."
Re: Life expectancy for men in US falls to 73 – six years less than women, study
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
It's always interesting to me when people bring up Franklin in this context because the aphorism is usually completely misunderstood. The audience and context was the colony of Pennsylvania deciding to accept an offer from the Penn family to provide a one-off detachment of mercenaries to patrol the colony's western border in exchange for a perpetual ban on taxing the Penn landholdings. The safety was border defense.…
Thank you, that is fascinating!