Also life expectancy changes as you age: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
By the time you hit 60, you've gone from ~75 to ~80.
"Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#12This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
Slight nitpick - accidents are not a top cause of death in the US, they are merely a top cause of early death. But this has a disproportionate effect on low life expectancy, because early death has a disproportionate effect on life expectancy stats. 1 person dying at age 20 (instead of 80) has the same effect on life expectancy as 60 people dying at age 79 (instead of 80).
I have my stats memorized. Accidents are at the very least in the top ten cause of death every year. Every year, around 100K people die in accidents, of which 40K were car accidents. However, that is dwarfed by 600K people dying of heart disease and 570K people dying of cancer every year.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slight nitpick - accidents are not a top cause of death in the US, they are merely a top cause of early death. But this has a disproportionate effect on low life expectancy, because early death has a disproportionate effect on life expectancy stats. 1 person dying at age 20 (instead of 80) has the same effect on life expectancy as 60 people dying at age 79 (instead of 80).
I have my stats memorized. Accidents are at the very least in the top ten cause of death every year. Every year, around 100K people die in accidents, of which 40K were car accidents. However, that is dwarfed by 600K people dying of heart disease and 570K people dying of cancer every year.
Not sure how we get to the word "dwarfed" in that analysis, since despite ranking below Europe on life expectancy, the US does significantly better on heart disease and cancer mortality.
Point being: something's going on here that confounds life expectancy comparisons.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have my stats memorized. Accidents are at the very least in the top ten cause of death every year. Every year, around 100K people die in accidents, of which 40K were car accidents. However, that is dwarfed by 600K people dying of heart disease and 570K people dying of cancer every year.
Not sure how we get to the word "dwarfed" in that analysis, since despite ranking below Europe on life expectancy, the US does significantly better on heart disease and cancer mortality. Point being: something's going on here that confounds life expectancy comparisons.
I didn't disagree with your analysis. I was only pointing out that accidents(ranked 5th) are indeed one of the top cause of death in the US, which I didn't make it clear in my last comment.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#15This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
I haven't studied the data, but I would be surprised if motor vehicle deaths were "anomalously" high. My hypothesis would be that it is an entirely expected outcome given the comparative lack of public transportation in this country relative to other industrialized nations such as Japan and those in Europe. More driving miles (or, perhaps, more hours spent driving) per capita should lead to more motor vehicle acciden…
I would be surprised if motor vehicle deaths were "anomalously" high
Depends. Does getting shot while driving count? ;-)
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#16Thanks for making me realize I've been using life expectancy tables incorrectly for most of my life. One comment regarding the yearly progress of the cohort rate. I would think this would fluctuate with significant medical advances (e.g. the first few years that bypass surgery/artificial hearts started to be used). I can't see how medical progression is perfectly linear at 1.0%/year.
I think you're overestimating the number of people who benefit from even a major advance. In the UK (population 70 million), 28,000 heart bypass operations happen per year. The number of people who will have one is in the low single digits as a percentage of the population. Even for those people who do have one there is no guarantee that it will have a significant impact on their lives. Yes for some it will but for o…
> I can see it might not be constant over an extended period, but I don't think there are many, if any, things that would cause a significant spike.
While it's hard to predict, I personally wouldn't bet against a game changing spike in the coming decades. It's only very recently that medicine has started riding Moore's law. Robotics and miniaturization are speeding up basic research by orders of magnitude.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that biology has achieved more in the past two decades than in all preceding history. And there's no sign that the exponential is running out.
Granted, there may be fundamental limits that we don't appreciate yet. That's the whole draw of science, we simply don't know.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#17A very interesting post indeed. Another common mistake many people seem to make is when comparing historical life expectancies. Most of our progress in prolonging human life is due to minimizing the infant mortality rate. This means that people who survived infancy and childhood could make it to an old age even in historical times.
This is true and a huge annoyance to me when people say "When social security was first put in place, most people didn't live to collect it!"
This is of course false. Back in the early 1900's when life expectancy was only around 60, if you survived your childhood, you'd likely live to 70 or 80.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't studied the data, but I would be surprised if motor vehicle deaths were "anomalously" high. My hypothesis would be that it is an entirely expected outcome given the comparative lack of public transportation in this country relative to other industrialized nations such as Japan and those in Europe. More driving miles (or, perhaps, more hours spent driving) per capita should lead to more motor vehicle acciden…
It's easier to maintain a dense public transportation system when the system's goals are (for instance) to move 80MM people around in an area the size of Colorado. Colorado, by comparison, has a population of 5MM. But yes, I was making the latter point. Does life expectancy tell us something about the differences between life in the United States and Finland? Yes... but what if all it's telling us is "the United Stat…
I wouldn't expect, say, Wyoming to have a well developed public transportation system, or even Colorado as a whole. But once you get past a fairly small number of major cities, our public transportation systems for metropolitan areas are still underdeveloped.
Colorado's front range, for example, would almost certainly benefit from having a well-developed commuter rail system, with heavy passenger rail connecting the corridor from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins (with a spur to Boulder) and light rail taking people from the terminals to points spread further out.
Doing something like this would take a long time and cost a lot of money, but our choice (so far) not to spend that money in most metro areas has a direct effect on the quality of life in this country.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#19This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
You'll tend to see similar effects for other medical issues, particularly cancer, in which the US notoriously outperforms many of the European countries that outrank it on life expectancy.
FWIW, I looked into this using the tables on http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/all-cancer... - not just the all cancers table, but also the separate tables for different types of cancer. The implication of what you write - that the US has better medical healthcare - didn't seem to stand out. Rather, it looked like different European countries have markedly different death rates from different cancers. Things like diet, lifestyle, prevalence of smoking, etc. seem like a better explanation for the variance. France has especially low heart disease deaths, for example, but slightly higher cancer deaths than the US. Etc.
And of course we all die of something, so I would expect cancer deaths to be higher in a country with a higher life expectancy even if the medical success in treatment was higher. Third world countries generally do not have high deaths from cancer.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#20This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
You may mean homicide rather than suicide: the US doesn't seem especially high in this ranking of suicide deaths -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... -- below many other rich or large countries, and not far from culturally/developmentally similar countries (like Canada/NZ/UK). The US does stick out among its usual developmental peers on the homicide rates -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... -- doubling or tripling our English-speaking or western-European peers.
Usually the way I hear this statistical point made is that the US leads the world in life expectancy when accidental injuries and violent crime are omitted. (Usually the point is deployed to caution people against making quick conclusions about US diet or medical care quality from national life expectancies, as for example here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-amer...)