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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

If I read that right, the mortality rate in the general population in 2020 (1027 per 100k); was higher than that found in the homeless community in 2011 (814 per 100k).

Who says the world is not becoming more dangerous (and not just among the homeless)?

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That's weird! Did something happen during 2020???

In 2020, the two main sources of life-sustaining resources for people without housing -- public spaces and other people -- were almost entirely cut off.

What do you need other people for? As long as the economy is still running basic services, you can just look inwards for happiness!

imagine being a homeless person looking at the news everyone saying "just stay at home!"

It might "just" be the homeless population is ageing. We really need a model prediction of how we expected the homeless population death rate to change over time. I doubt it is in a steady state.

"The number of Californians 55 and older who sought homelessness services soared 84% between 2017 and 2021" (from the article), so something demographic is changing. It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

> It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

What happened to what retirement savings?

45% percent of households with members ages 55 to 64 have no savings at all. The median retirement account balance is about $100,000; most middle-class people need $600,000. There are 39 million workers 55 and older in the U.S. Workers 75 and older are the fastest-growing age segment of the workforce.

https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20231028173718/https://www.nirso...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448800

Housing is also wildly unaffordable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39550922 (citations)

A disturbing number of people in the US don't have much retirement savings to speak of. Or any retirement savings at all.

> It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

Multi-year medical problems leading to bankruptcy and divorce.

I'm a little confused why you chose those two not-particlarly-comparable data points.

More notable -- and horrifying -- is the large rise in the homeless mortality rate between 2011 and 202.

It was in the article. I am more interested in knowing why the author of the article chose those two particular years. Was 2011 the lowest number out of the last 25? Was 2020 the highest?

If they were chosen to cherry-pick the data in order to better support a predetermined conclusion, then the whole study is suspect. Too many people do that on a wide variety of topics and then wonder why readers are so skeptical.

It's a really unfortunate year for comparison. There was that one advantage to being outside...

For those not reading the article,

> The death rate across all 22 localities increased from 814 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2011, to 2,752 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2020.

> Among the general population, the nationwide mortality rate was much lower: 1,027 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Doesn't 1000 per 100k imply roughly average of 100 age span?

Which seems really good to me.

No, but I really gotta know how you drew that conclusion

Because if you had stable amount of population if people lived to be 100 years old then each year 1000 out of 100k would die.

In this case, I think the assumption that doesn't bear out is "stable amount of population". The relationship between death rate and expected lifespan is likely calculable, but only if you also have either age data or at least approximate change in birthrate data, preferably going back to living memory. We might have that available somewhere, but I don't think your estimate came from having it.

Like let's say there's a terrible war, and half of all people die. Can we conclude that most people are dying around 2? This example is extreme, but shows that we at least need some averages over time to start making a case for life expectancy being predicted well by the data

Yes, but also part of my point, that the above author based on these numbers implied that World is getting more dangerous, but firstly as you mentioned these numbers are meaningless if we don't know the exact demographics of the 100k and secondly for a stable 100k these would be really good numbers.

Makes sense from that perspective. Thanks for taking the time to clarify

No because the population skews younger.

But even then you can hardly determine that it is a bad or unexpected number, as you would get that number if each year same amount of people were born and died and everyone lived to 100.

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