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Comment by drewcoo | Hacker News Reader

US life expectancy is dropping.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...

And if life expectancy for a few elites is increasing, that means it's decreasing even more for the rest of us, given the trends.

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It isn't the same statistic, but middle age mortality seems likely enough to be correlated with life expectancy. A bachelors is enough to signal "elite":

https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1603895646565634049

>A bachelors is enough

This is still only about 1/3 of the US population. If we’re generous to the OP’s point, it still supports it (granted the tone of “a few elites” may be read differently)

Average life expectancy doesn't say anything.

Covid and drug ODs really isn't a life expectancy issue

yes. average life expectancy tells you very little about how long YOU will live

You might look at something like the median life expectancy of a 65-year-old. That skips over a lot of early deaths that really bias the "average life expectancy".

For instance, you might find that in 1980 the median life expectancy at 65 was 25 years, and today that number might be higher. You'd still be getting a lot of lifestyle disease deaths though. Obesity and diabetes really grew after 1980.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

It might be even better to look at median life expectancy at 70 or 75, if your idea is to gauge whether modern medicine is keeping people alive longer. Start with the group of people that at least made it that far. 70 or 75 is still probably too early for "died of old age" to happen, and those people are past most of the "died of something else" deaths.

> And if life expectancy for a few elites is increasing, that means it's decreasing even more for the rest of us, given the trends.

I don't see how that follows, please, show your work.

Average life expectancy is down. Life expectancy for rich people is up, so non-rich life expectancy is dropping faster than the average.

Cool. I repeat my previous statement.

It's basic math at this point!

Mos def. (⌐■_■)

(Still gotta show your work tho)

If you can't do 5th grade math, why are you in this forum? This isn't a 5th grade class and you should pretend play supervisor elsewhere.

Your memories of the 5th grade are likely much more recent than mine. As I recall it, showing your work was occasionally necessary for my own edification especially when my final answer was a result of hasty guesswork predicated on faulty assumptions.

Mr Munger making it to a ripe old age and being a wealthy man to boot could literally be shaving years off your life expectancy. But I sense that if you write out all your thinking, step by step, you might find a flaw in that line of reasoning. Even though it is.. simple mathematics. ;)

I would like to know life expectancy trends for non overweight adults, by income/wealth decile or quintile.

Turns out regardless of wealth generally healthy adults who make it to old age typically die from various cancers (or falling in the shower) at around the same age as the rest of the cohort.

Having large families, lots of friends, and a sunny disposition (as opposed to being an edgy communist for example), minorly but measurably increases your life expectancy.

Citations please. Especially for the stats on edgy communists. Or do you perceive this thread as "pro-Communist", hence all the edgy comments by you in this thread?

Does edgy communism track with a less than sunny disposition, asking for a friend

Assuming your diet is sane and your weight is under control, you don't smoke/drink and you didn't get into an accident, the next thing to watch out for would be depression and suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

Social isolation and loneliness amongst the elderly are widely known to lead to adverse health outcomes and shorter life expectancies.

https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-older...

Cancers and terminal illnesses of all sorts eventually come for everybody, luck of the draw. But in so far as you can control anything being less stressed and having more friends correlates very well to living a tad longer.

You are most welcome to compare life expectancy stats between communist countries and none communist countries and make your own conclusions about life of course ;)

Do you have an actual source for this in addition to "it turns out that"?

How's it for edgy libertarians? (asking for someone I know)

If that someone you know is a friend or a loved one tell them that you are probably better off spending time with them than arguing about politics online with either edgy communists or edgy libertarians. And then go to the zoo or something. Have the chef make a you a nice picnic. Try and relax old sport.

Don't see what all the halabaloo is about.

It dropped over the past 2 years due to COVID. In general it's on an upward trend.

It has been on a downward trend before covid19. For example, American life expectancy is lower than Cuban life expectancy.

What? It's been steady at around 78.5 - 78.9 between 2010 and 2019 [1]. I'm not sure what the point of mentioning Cuba was or its relevance to trends in the US life expectancy is; its life expectancy has been within a year of the US for the past 40 years[2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/LExpMort.pdf

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...

Your own chart confirms my statement, inspite of the misapplied use of the adjective "steady", which you switched to from the "upward trend" you stated in your first comment. THERE IS NO UPWARD TREND.

What was steady before 2014 is the INCREASE in life expectancy every year. The first derivative was steady. Now the first derivative has been negative and expectancy is only STEADY if you squint your eyes to lower the resolution of the data to 0.5 instead of 0.1

This is a clearer chart with delta measurements

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...

You can see the decline phase in red in the lower split. It's a marked shift from the continuous green line. To see it more clearly set the end date to 2018. You can clearly see from your own data that life expectancy peaked in the United States in 2014 and hasn't recovered yet. If the previous green trend had continued we would be at a life expectancy of 80.0 - not still short if the 2014 peak.

The purpose of the example of Cuba is CONTRAST. How a lower income country with a higher baseline life expectancy continues to have a green trend i.e. life expectancy at year n+1 is more than year n - ALWAYS.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CUB/cuba/life-expectan...

It has not been "steady". It has reversed trends from a consistent increase in expectancy - green trend - every year since records have been kept. All changes in life expectancy are in the decimal range. Disguising the decline by specifying a range doesn't help.

You seem to have peculiar definitions of the words "falling" and "steady", which do not mean "decreasing" and "flat" respectively.

The decade of the 2010s has a linear regression slope of -.008 years / year, well within the measurement error. I stand by my use of "steady" to describe that.

You can put words in my mouth. But you claimed upward trend. I didn't. You switched it to steady. I did not. You picked arbitrary time windows and lowered the resolution, I did not. Your data contradicts your own thesis. Mine doesn't.

Life expectancy increased every year in the united States peaking in 2014, when it reversed trends.

We still haven't recovered to 2014 levels 8 years later. The data you shared validates my original comment which states that life expectancy was DECREASING before covid19.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/life-expectancy-is-declini...

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