Absolutely. And the major reason for that is that high-income individuals have no obstacles to quality health care including preventative care. Those in lower income brackets have multiple problems getting access, ranging from insurance costs, poor insurance coverage, crappy HMOs, and unaffordable deductibles and co-pays. Universal health care would go a long way toward addressing that problem. High-income individuals may also have healthier lifestyles which is a separate issue.
Still related - food deserts are a real thing, diet-wise, and higher income jobs (or even not having to work) generally means reduced or no physical effects from labor (being a 70 year old working lawyer is very possible while being a 70 year old construction worker is unlikely) and more time for regular exercise
Then the headline shouldn’t say that the life expectancy is shrinking. It should say that compared with other countries it isn’t rising as theirs is. A headline shouldn’t be inaccurate so it can get you to read the article.
Both statements are true. US life expectancy progression is worse that that of comparator countries (and has been for several decades), and US life expectancy is currently shrinking (in a way that, comparison with other countries suggests, is not accounted for solely by Covid).
So, the headline’s not inaccurate. It’s just not as gloomy as it might be. It tells only part of the story (but it’s in the nature of headlines to do that).
The headline is inaccurate. It says that U.S. life expectancy is shrinking. It’s not, unless you only look at 2020 and 2021. Life expectancy dropped in 2020 and 2021 for all the comparative countries too. (I’m not sure why the chart doesn’t include 2022 for any country.) The bad news is that from 1980 to 2019 the life expectancy hasn’t risen as fast as it has risen in comparative countries. The question isn’t whether the headline is as gloomy as it should be. The question is whether it is accurate. The chart goes from 1980 to 2021 and the headline should be talking about that whole period. What needs to be discussed is why the life expectancy isn’t increasing as fast over the whole period. The reasons for that are discussed in the article and in this thread.
Not true. Construction workers aren’t paid well. They often have to continue to work into old age to have enough money to retire on. I can’t find exact numbers on how often they continue to work until that old, but the average age of retirement for them has gone up.
Needing to work into old age is very different from the physical ability to do so.
I can assure you that most current 40 year old lawyers (or professors or such) will be physically capable of performing the same legal work they currently do to age 70 (or even to 80 or 90) while the same will not be true of current 40 year old construction workers. As in performing the same job - not moving into management or starting their own company or whatnot. 70 year olds working a construction site and not being an inspector or manager are very much more rare than 70 year old lawyers.
I’m not sure why this is even a concept that requires much debate. Those who perform demanding physical labor on a daily basis will, by a larger proportion, be rendered physically incapable of working to later age than those who do not, though it is the former who will, by a larger proportion, find it financially necessary to work as long as possible.
While there are still differences between nations, in general this is also reflected in life expectancy numbers, which are generally higher for managerial/professional occupations than the trades. It’s perverse in many ways.
Do you have any statistics on this or is it just your guess?
Granted, based solely on my observations, so no hard numbers, so if you happen to find a work site filled with workers (again, not inspectors, managers, foremen) eligible for social security or have had contract done by such, please feel free to share and I’ll readily admit that I was absolutely wrong that senior citizens still doing heavy lifting after a few decades on the job are just as common, if not more common, than senior citizen doing legal work after a few decades on the job.
Not that it really changes the original point - the main point still being that healthier lifestyles (less physically debilitating work, readily available and healthy food) are still correlated with income, so it’s not really a separate issue that high income individuals have healthier lifestyles. I did not think that was a controversial point, but I was quite apparently wrong about that.
So then the headline is accurate. We’ve had a ginormous drop in the average lifespan in the US during 2020 and 2021. And we even had specific years where it dropped between 2014 and 2019. So, the headline isn’t inaccurate.
We can discuss more than one thing related to the article or the topic. We can discuss the US falling behind relative to the rest of the world. We can discuss how the US actually lost lifespan in some years even before Covid. We can discuss why the US took such a bigger hit than the rest of the world during Covid. The headline doesn’t have to encompass every single thing that can be discussed. But the headline is technically accurate.
Your objection is what’s inaccurate.
Anyway, I think the problems with US life expectancy compared to other Western nations comes down to some combination of a much smaller social safety net, much worse healthcare for lower income people, and income inequality.
The cause of lowering life expectancy is not a mystery. It is a deliberate policy.
Southeastern states have lowest life expectancy in US, new CDC report shows
[R]esidents of Mississippi had the lowest life expectancy, at 74.4 years old, and the lowest for males at 71.2 years.
The bottom five states were all in the South and included West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee. West Virginia had the lowest life expectancy for women at 77.3 years.
Why is Mississippi lowest? Well, maybe because Over half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing. Why is this happening? Because like several other southern state governors, Mississippi’s governor chose to do the same. This is a purely racist policy, as calculated as impossible voting tests and poll taxes. Black lives are shorter in the south, correlating with places that were under slavery.
In short, southern state governors are deliberate killing off their poorest citizens in order to hurt blacks and own the libs. This is an easily reversible condition.
Who’s stopping you?
The death cult that is the GOP just won the last election, good luck reversing that.
But not in Arizona.
And one could make a case that part the difference was all the unvaccinated GOP that died and didn’t vote.
So once could propose that, if the declining life expectancy is due to lifestyle choices, maybe nothing should be done. In the long run, Americans might be smarter and longer-lived.
For anyone who wants to take a deep dive into the long term trends in context of comparison to our peer countries I offer this:
It’s pretty dire.
I’d be very curious to see the high income countries graphed by a measure of income and/or wealth inequality and life and health expectancy.
My suspicion is that even beyond safety nets less wealth inequality correlates with greater life and health expectancy.
That’s not changing though.
Again, the life expectancy increased a little in the U.S. from 1980 to 2019. It only dropped in 2020 and 2021. The headline makes it seem like it was decreasing from 1980 to 2021.
Another article of interest.
Nobody thinks that. The headline,
‘Live free and die?’ The sad state of U.S. life expectancy
says nothing about dates.
If you’re referring to the figure, life expectancy dropped in the US and comparable countries in 2020. It rebounded in other countries in 2021, but not in the US, where it declined further. Hence the accurate not-headline:
Life expectancy continues to decline in the U.S. as it rebounds in other countries
I’m gonna say you don’t know much about US politics if you think that the opposition party, in a midterm election in a bad economy, winning less than ten seats in the House and none in the Senate counts as a “win”.