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

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

statnews.com

65 pointspseudolus126 comments

At 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

Great quote. Hopefully you get two more quarters but I hope that doesn't take away from the motivation ;)

Drugs and obesity skew the numbers, so you're probably more likely in the final 1/3rd.

You're making 2 assumptions there!

I like to reassure myself that my first 20-25 years were wasted on things like "learning basic life skills" and "working too many hours at my first jobs", and that everything I really consider "my life" has taken place in the portion since then.

So by the actuarial life tables, he has 24.5 years left, and has had about 30-35 years of self-directed life so far, which gets him up to 40-45% of his life remaining.

but 1/3 < 1/4 right?

what kind of math is that?

Burger math

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.

> 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?

Yeah, I don't think about Martingales a lot, but after reviewing the definition -- this literally is one.

In discrete time it's very simple; you just roll the dice every day, and if they come up snake eyes, Zeus smites you with a lightning bolt.

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.

> At age 54, I'm now in the final quarter of my life.

Not on average. Life expectancy such as "73" without further qualification means "life expectancy when born today". Since you already made it until 54, your life expectancy is higher than 73 (probably somewhere close to 80).

If you are not convinced outright, think of what your life expectancy is if you were 74.

Forget about life expectancy. What are the odds you'll want to do big things and be able to do them after age 70?

For 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.

    In 2021, the death rate increased but was still lower than pre-pandemic levels.

    In 2022, Australia's pattern of mortality differed to that of the first two years of the pandemic and the number of deaths increased by almost 20,000 deaths from 2021, with almost 10,000 of these being due to COVID-19.

(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.

Is part of the reason that there are a lot of younger men dying at much younger ages which skews the life expectancy? Or do they exclude outliers when they are putting the numbers together?

In short, yes. See the link in my earlier comment.

It is a statistical artifact of many more Americans dying due to fatal injuries at a young age. If you remove the fatal injuries, Americans are pretty long-lived despite their poor lifestyles.

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 crushers on mine sites to unbog them, washed live HV power lines in faraday suits risking jump over, played with snakes, ... all the fun stuff and despite that my generation has 10 years greater life expectancy from birth than my US cohort generation.

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://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176830906/overdose-death-202...

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.

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"

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 young (because young). Multiple people I knew as a child living in agricultural country died very young in vehicular accidents.

I don’t know how much of this is relevant in 2023. I suspect driving is more restricted than when I was a child. The other major factor is the crime gang warfare that tends to kill a lot of young men. Most Americans will never intersect this subset of the population but it is a major source of skew in longevity statistics.

For better or worse, if you survive into your mid-30s, Americans have a long life expectancy. There are significant sub-populations for who those early years are significant filters.

> 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.

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.

Well Texas has more people traveling on roads like Farm to Market roads which very frequently two lanes, no median or other barrier separating two cars traveling in opposing directions, each at 70-80mph. There are often large pickup trucks on these roads too, which doesn't help at all. Australia is 11 times bigger than Texas yet has 86% of the population. Assuming he's in Victoria, which is the state that most closely matches 3x the size of Texas, there would be 2 million people in an area the size of Texas. From what I can see, the drunk driving rate is similar; There's a lot more for drunk people to hit in Texas. Most of their speed limits on the highway are, according to Wikipedia, between 50-70mph.In Texas, 75mph is common between major cities, and even on those aforementioned farm-to-market roads which are everywhere. 80 is posted in 10 counties in west Texas, and we've got an 85mph signed road southeast of Austin. I got passed by a cop going about 100. I was going about 100, to be clear.

I think in US you do not need to attend driving school in order to get license. Is it same for Australia?

Yes.

Australia requires you to take a driving test - a "written" largely multi choice test to demonstrate understanding of road rules, success there gives you [L] learner plates that allow you to drive under supervision and practice. You then have to pass a practical driving test to gain [P] probationary plates for unassisted driving with some restrictions - after a year or so you're a full driver.

No driving school is required - but it can help if you don't have access to a cool calm collected experienced driver who can walk you the skills test - reversing, parallel park, correct signalling, emergency stop, etc.

Depends on the state.

> The decline in life expectancy in the U.S. suggests that advancements in medical treatment are no longer sufficient to counter ongoing public health crises, Yan said. “We have a health care system that is very advanced in treating illnesses and advanced disease. But for the most part … it is not very good when it comes to preventative care.”

Medical treatment is hard to even get. It feels so inaccessible at times. I have a order for blood tests right now, idk how much it is going to cost and what my insurance will cover, and there aren't appointments for 2 weeks at least. Im pretty sure most specialist are that hard to see. Psychologists are ime. I think it might actually be impossible to see dermatologist.

Im curious what life expectancy would be calculated as if they removed some of the easily avoidable issues, like assume I don't kill my self, or OD on opioids, live my life at a healthy weight. What is the male life expectancy then?

79.1 for women (all races), and 61.5 for black men, as of 2022, in the USA. Wow.

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.

Damn we're really gonna have to fix this at the next patriarchy meeting.

Maybe we should stop getting infected with COVID eh?

That is not a realistic or sensible option.

I am glad I'm reading this while intermittent fasting....

Absolutely astounding that there is a non-zero number of people here implying that this disproves the existence of patriarchy.

Too many levels of irony in this comment. Invoking Poe's law.

Looking for non-zero of anything is just asking to be upset all the time.

Honestly, I have no reason to think there’s any anything that will reverse this trend

Lesser than in Cuba.

Capitalism kills.

Socialism is more productive, with more years of life expectancy with fewer resources.

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?

Despair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

The "deaths of despair" narrative has been found really wanting: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-deaths-of-despair-narrative... and it's probably time to throw it out entirely. The tl;dr is that most of the effect disappears when you use age-adjusted death rates instead of arbitrary buckets (whose average age goes up over time) and adjust for things like obesity, gun violence, and car accidents.

Suicide and overdoses

Drug abuse.

Vacation time.

Lest someone assume the parent is a snide comment, Europeans tend to have significantly longer vacations.

Add in drug abuse, those are pretty huge (though gun violence isn't a real influencer here, just doesn't put up the numbers heart disease does).

Gun violence is a major influencer of life expectancy in America. The average American would live a couple of years longer without gun deaths (including suicide and accidents).

https://time.com/5471069/guns-life-expectancy/

The reason that it has such an outsized effect is because it tends to happen early in life.

Oh right, suicide. But wouldn't at least a portion of those suicides still be suicides without guns?

Not successful ones. The issue with not having an available loaded gun is that you have to plan your death.

Obtaining a gun is planning in the exact same way walking to the top of a roof or grabbing a fist full of pills is planning.

Raking a fistful of pill fail often, with little consequences (unlike a bullet, who might fail but consequences are painful).

Jumping is rare, the only case I know of was someone with bone cancer who suffered a lot (I'm kinda remember her but I was very young when she died). Bullets are a common way to go for people with hunting background. There is a reason why 'revolving credits' were called 'revolver credits' in my area before they were basically outlawed (I'm from the countryside).

People do kill themselves with guns, nobody was debating that...

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.

Well, maybe like 1% of deaths if you include suicides as "gun violence" (kinda weird, but is often stated), maybe 2% if you focus on only men.

But yea, it's a literal nonfactor in aggregate life expectancy. Amdahl's law applies here too.

According to [1], "homicide, suicide and gun deaths" is the 2nd highest factor in explaining the difference.

[1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/...

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 lower), drug deaths are over 100k per year, and metabolic diseases dwarf all of the above.

So, no, what you wrote is wrong.

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.

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.

If you want actual analysis of this, I'd suggest:

- https://www.slowboring.com/p/tackling-americas-weirdly-short...

- https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-coping-ourselves...

> Tackling America's weirdly short life expectancy

Shows US higher than Poland.

Okay.

I don't understand your complaint, isn't that accurate?

> Indeed, life expectancy in the United States is so bad that the relevant comparison class is a set of much poorer countries like Chile and Poland — countries that are richer than the world average but aren’t even close to the top.

Covid.

Americans live on average 2 years less than Europeans. [1]

37% of US adults and 16% of EU adults are obese (2014). [2]

Even moderate obesity reduces life expectancy by 3 years. Severe obesity is 10 years. [3]

Factor in the not-obsese-but-overweight, and you explain basically the entire difference.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/09/health/american-life-expectan...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670332/

[3] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2009-03-18-moderate-obesity-takes-...

More recent stats

US [1]

Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 41.9% (2017-March 2020) Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6%

EU [2] [3]

Obese: 16% Percent of adults aged 18 and over with overweight, including obesity: 52.7%

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/hlth_ehis_bm1...

It doesn't help that virtually all foods in the US have added sugar. If some day I read about vegetables and livestock being genetically engineered to increase sugar content as well, I would be completely unsurprised.

You should compare with similar economies, so Germany and Spain (France has less industry so the almost 80 yo life expectancy for men is 'easier').

Car culture is a big one. No pedestrian collision safety regulation at all, extremely low driving standards (and pervasive illegal driving without a license even so), and long car commutes as standard.

Black and Native American life expectancy drag it down a fair bit. A median European dropped in US only loses a few years. In fact this goes for lots of stuff; drop someone from Norway in America and their chance of dying by gun doesn't change much either.

On the other side, Japanese-Americans are basically the longest lived people on the planet. Medical outcomes are generally excellent in the US, so when they intersect with healthy, safe lifestyles the results are good. Poor and dangerous lifestyles do a lot of heavy lifting in the US when it comes to life expectancy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/january/evolu...

Fentanyl, a male suicide crisis and a strong cultural taboo around male mental health, bad responses to COVID-19, poor medical system, and social attitudes strongly attack tackling health care issues for men as somehow oppressive to women. (Compare and contrast funding for prostate cancer and breast cancer in the USA).

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 safety is entirely sensible.

For those who haven't looked, this analysis is very useful.

Almost all the gap is caused by the higher rate of deaths of under 25yos in the US.

From [1] the largest differences appears to be:

1) Road deaths

2) Homicide, suicide and gun deaths

3) Drug related deaths.

[1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/...

Actually I've read this the wrong way around. The biggest difference is actually cardio-matabolic diseases!

"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.

Agreed on fentanyl, but there are other areas where nanny-stating saves lives.

The evidence on higher tobacco and alcohol taxes, for instance, is pretty irrefutable.

Or, moving up the implausibility scale in the American context, drastic reductions in the availability of handguns including the mass forfeiture of existing weapons (which has been done in a number of other developed countries).

You may not like any of these, particularly the last, but the fact is that they would increase life expectancy significantly.

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."

Thank you, that is fascinating!

Trash food

Stress

Fear

Plastics.

All work and no fun

Drug overdoses.

Well 20 years ago the US drinking culture and driving culture made car accidents a main driver especially in distorting the lower age demograpics. But in the past few years opiods is basically the top cause of death of adults before 45 which then is mostly heart disease. So the recent drop is almost entirely opiods. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/16umz...

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.

> The picture is especially concerning for men, whose life expectancy is now 73.2 years, compared with women’s 79.1. This 5.9 year gap is the widest between the two genders since 1996.

> […]

> “The opioid epidemic, mental health, and chronic metabolic disease are certainly front and center in the data that we see here, explaining why there’s this widening life expectancy gap by gender, as well as the overall drop in life expectancy,” said Yan. Men have higher mortality rates from all three conditions compared to women.

Your TL;DR.

Perhaps to be fair we should let men retire earlier or collect larger social security checks, so the average total paid out would be roughly equal?

Let's aim for more modest goals, like just making men and women's retirement ages equal. But even that elicits protests: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-women-pensions-id...

The numbers given were for someone born today. See full table by age and race here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf

At 65 the difference is 2.7 years: A 65 year old man has an expectancy of 81.9, compared against a 65 year old woman expectancy of 84.6.

Testosterone causes risky behavior, statistically speaking.

It’s not dead men, it’s the car crashes that make insuring 18 year old males so expensive…in but one example…

Testosterone itself shortens life.

It's why bodybuilders die younger than any other athlete.

Is that the direct link though? I always thought it was the extra pressure on the heart due to the increased blood pumping requirement?

Not sure.

But if you've ever seen someone on test, you'll see them visibly age.

Just no.

Steroids cause premature death, not testosterone.

"Desserts cause obesity, not cookies."

I'm eating my shoe

Testosterone is a steroid.

Aside from risky behavior, are there chemical risks to taking TRT? I've begun considerations into taking it (late 30s)

Make sure to consult a doctor. I wouldn’t trust what random people on the internet say.

With that being said, the first thing the doc will ask is what you hope to gain from TRT. Often the answer to that question is a mix of diet/exercise/sleep which you should try to address first. And if you’ve truly got that sorted, then it’s time to loop in a professional.

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