16 June 2011

Welcome to the 3rd World

In a significant portion of the United States, life expectancy is falling:

Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.

Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.

Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.

In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.
You can find the original article here.

There are some idiots out there who will suggest that it's because we are too fat*, but the deltas in life expectancy have primarily been through eliminating infant and child mortality, as well as pregnancy related medical issues.

What is going on here is that our medical system is breaking down.

We are undergoing the same collapse of our medical system, albeit more slowly, that occurred towards the end of the USSR, and there was not an outbreak of obesity there.

We have aging and under maintained infrastructure, we are wasting our resources on endless wars and a bloated defense establishment, and we are descending into a morass of corruption and self dealing with no prospect of it being fixed (see Geithner, Tim).

It sounds an awful lot like the declining days of the USSR.

*He says that the same thing happened when we went from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but it misses little facts like:
  • The average hunter gatherer works about 20 hours a week, the farmer works 60+ hours.
  • The diet of a hunter gatherer is measurably better than that of a bronze or early Iron age farmer, because staple crops are typically less nutritionally complete.
  • Agriculture requires that people move next to bodies of water, and live there full time, exposing them to things like Malaria, etc.

What really happened is that people could no longer be hunter gatherers because there was not enough land. You need something like 5 square km/year to support a single hunter gatherer, and once population crosses that threshold you move to herding, and eventually to farming, because the alternative is starvation.
life expectancies falling

2 comments :

Alex said...

There are some idiots out there who <span>will suggest that it's because we are too fat</span><sup>*</sup>,

Well, "those idiots" are the demographers who did the study. The delta is primarily due to heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes - all are consequences of obesity, and I doubt it's a coincidence that the delta is happening in areas with high percentages of obese people.

Matthew G. Saroff said...

The numbers on obesity and heart disease are quite clear:  Their impact on life expectancy are minimal.  See my post of May 11 on this.

Americans smoke and drink less than the Europeans and Japanese, who beat us in life expectancy, obesity is a trivial amount of healthcare costs, etc.

I would also note that the basic math of life expectancy means that someone dying at 67 instead of 75 has less effect than someone dying early from infant mortality or pregnancy complications, because that is how averages work.

To suggest that late in life diseases make much of a difference in life expectancy reveals mathematical illiteracy.

Remember also, Americans smoke less than their counterparts.

It's why, until 1900, the life expectancy of women was less than men (but more for celebate women like nuns).  Too many died in their 20s giving birth.

Additionally, your example of the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming is simply ahistorical and wrong, the quality and quantity of nutrition in the agrarian transition dropped significantly, which is well documented.

Simply put, if choose to ignore elementary mathematics and basic historical facts to make your argument, you are being an idiot.

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