Also, every map of the US like the same.
Yes. But the death of one person at the of 8 moves the average more than the death of one person at the age of 78. So events which result in more infant/child/adoloscent/young adult/middle-aged death have a greater impact that changes which result in a similar number of geriatric deaths — the younger the deaths, the bigger the effect.
This cuts both ways — improvements in child/adolescent/young adult/etc mortality do more to improve life expectancy than improvements in geriatric care that defer a similar number of deaths.
Yes, but most measures effect life expectancy by days. There is no low hanging fruit that will let a population of geriatrics live years longer.
You just have to not shoot a kid to see a measurable effect on your avg. life expectancy that is orders of magnitude larger than the effectiveness of most medicine.
Can you show the math on that? Like, with actual real world numbers?
Here’s a paper that calculates a loss in life expectancy due to firearms (assault + suicide) of about 100 days in children. Note: 2000–2016 data.
DOI 10.1136/bmjebm-2018-111103
What I wrote might mislead. A newborn’s life expectancy was reduced by about 100 days due to firearms. But the vast majority of that reduction was due to violence after reaching adulthood.
That’s a great map. But what matters for social policy is not an analysis of the 5 worst outliers. Those, pretty much by definition have unique things about them that make them the outliers. What matters for public policy is looking at whatever commonalities there are in the range something like the first standard deviation on the bad side. That at least will get you the most overall change, given resources.
Another approach, also given some resources, is to look near the long tail for low(er) hanging fruit.
In either case looking at the overall map the issue is obvious: rural + poor + ignorant = unhealthy. Now which of those three causal factors is most amenable to intervention is a question left to the reader.
I think my phrasing was unclear (or I exaggerated at bit)
My point :If you (the USA) stopped shooting their children, you (the USA) would see an improvement in avg. life expectancy that would be orders of magnitude larger than what most individual drugs are doing.
Individual drugs, sure; many don’t even affect life expectancy at all, even if they significantly affect quality-adjusted life-years. This study attributes about a third of the gain from 1990 to 2015 to pharmaceuticals, which works out to a bit over a year.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00284
DOI 10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00284
I think the point others are trying to make is, while shootings are the number one cause of death for children, it’s just not that many kids. So, (making up numbers) if 100 kids die 50 years too early, that’s tragic and will bring the life expectancies down. But, if 10 million poor and lower middle class people die 10 years too early from lack of medical care, malnutrition, and diseases of despair (suicide, drugs, alcoholism), that will have a much bigger effect.
Exactly.
Murdered kids have lots of individual leverage on the stats, and lots of newsworthiness.
But numerically they are a microscopic pinprick versus the vastly greater but utterly un-newsworthy numbers of deprived citizens quietly dying a decade or more early in silently shared misery.
The latter is what drives the US’s dismal life expectancy numbers, not the former.
Dead kids are not contributing to silently shared misery of deprived citizens?
I think those words do not mean what you think they do.
What you think about your words,
Dead kids are not contributing to silently shared misery of deprived citizens?
has very little to do with @LSLGuy ’s words.
Is there a name for this kind of fallacy or non-argument argument? Appeal to emotion?
I don’t recall any specific fallacies/arguments, but it is related to “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic”.
We will preferentially focus on a lower number of deaths we consider unnatural or unusually violent vs a much larger number who lose fewer years to systemic, societal failures. It’s very human to find it easier to empathize with the former, though both are tragically horrific in their own way.
I mean specifically going in an orthogonal direction in the argument. We were talking about statistical deaths that bring down life expectancy and The_Librarian was focused on kids, because each kid misses a lot of years.
That’s true, but there just aren’t that many kids dying from guns, statistically speaking. So, I and LSLGuy focused on that, claiming that deaths from despair, for example, causes fewer life-years lost per person, but there are many, many more of them.
Then, The_Librarian asks whether dying kids cause misery and despair.
I mean, of course they do. Jeez. But, that has nothing to do with the statistical effect on life expectancy.
It’s like an argument in the wrong direction or a category error or something.
Sure, it sounds related somewhat to an argument over scope.
Upon a quick googling, something very akin to scope neglect.
ETA: the wiki page references ‘mass numbing’ which seems more relevant in context
Yeah, maybe it’s that. Thanks!
All that said. … gun related deaths HAD been on long term trend downwards. That trend ceasing and in some years reversing, both homicide and suicide related, does have significant contribution to decreased life expectancy.
I am in favor of a variety of gun control measures but I also suspect that the trend reversal is more a result of causes that impact deaths in other groups too, related to structural issues especially pronounced in the US compared to other wealthy countries.
“Significant” in a statistical sense, not magnitude of contribution, if the first paper I found is to be believed. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed in addition to other factors. Or for different, perfectly valid reasons.
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The second paper I found attributes more of the pre-pandemic increase to “public health” than to pharmaceuticals. I can’t access it on this device but I’m curious to learn what’s included in that bin and how they drew their conclusions.
FWIW they found accidental poisoning or drug overdose to be the largest negative contributor to changes in life expectancy. This is only through 2015. So I expect that kept growing.