The single driver, no, and not just kids, but more than just statistical significance. From the paper:
About two and a half years of life expectancy loss overall, more in Blacks than whites, and more associated with suicide in whites.
Again though, I suspect reflective of structural issues that impact deaths from other causes as well.
My mind was still focused on kids but if yours was not, then yes, gun deaths at all ages do noticeably affect life expectancy in the US.
Who knew?
To repeat: the difference in life expectancy between the USA and other rich industrialized countries is completely due to guns and outrageously dangerous traffic.
Agreed. I just found that interesting (and distressing).
Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is any low-hanging fruit. Obesity, opioid abuse, etc. are all really difficult social problems. Maybe a new generation of drugs can help, but that’s pretty wishful thinking.
Well the article specifically mentions that the bulk of the homicides are of those under 20. So even just looking at kids, I think we hit meaningfully significant.
FWIW the various articles and analyses all linked to in this thread are very clear that the causes include those factors among many others. Repeating something fails to make it less false.
This entire string of objections stemmed from your unsupported claims about childhood deaths, which you later admitted were “exaggerated” when you were asked for numbers. Not whether gun or traffic deaths contribute. We all know guns and traffic deaths contribute.
Bolding mine. Is this also ”exaggerated” or do you have data this time? The link in the OP even lists out contributing factors. If you think it’s wrong, by all means show us where and why.
The majority life expectancy loss from homicides, not the majority of homicides, and among black americans, not all. Still a serious problem, obviously.
Something like 11% of homicides and 8% of all firearm deaths were kids. Not “only” 11% because that’s literally thousands of kids.
Separately, our librarian friend got me thinking about traffic; how messed up is it that we drive less, have safer cars, and still managed to increase traffic deaths?
Good points and my misread.
Indeed not be lost: kids should die rarely. Gun deaths have become the top cause of death in kids.
That map and article confirms what I said in post #33. The disparity is not accidental.
Yes, but the county map shows that reality is a bit more complicated than what the states show. Oregon and Florida have similar life expectancies, but Oregon is fairly even, while Florida shows deep rifts between north and south.
I would not want to live in the deep South or Appalachia.
All states have blue urban areas, even in the south. State governments and county and city governments are in an active war in many red states. Mississippi has taken over part of the police department in Jackson, MS, to protect only the white areas. Texas has just taken over the Houston school district. Missouri has a plan to take over the St. Louis police. The volume of these moves has increased greatly since the Republican state government took over Flint, MI. The commonality is that the areas have majority minority populations. Native American counties have been oppressed by state and federal governments since forever.
The larger trend is overwhelmingly obvious. Surely local variations and politics must be taken into account, but that’s like letting local weather obscure global warming.
It’s clear from the county map that this is not really an urban vs. rural thing. Nor is it exactly a red state/blue state thing.
Rich vs. poor is getting closer, but still not nearly enough to explain the disparities (Madison is the richest county in Mississippi, but has one of the worst life expectancy rankings). And neither is minority vs. not (the southern California counties do fine despite having huge Hispanic/Latino populations).
While there are certainly some state-by-state political differences, I would say that’s not really identifying the root causes. It’s a rough proxy at best.
In the southern states, it appears to be very correlated with at least some combination of wealth and urbanity, though.
In Arkansas, the bluest bit is near Fayetteville (yes, Little Rock is larger, but the real wealth/power is up in NWA).
In Tennessee, likewise, the area around Nashville (again, yes Memphis larger, but the real wealth/power is in Nashville).
North Carolina has the blue bits near Charlotte and Raleigh. Georgia near Atlanta. South Carolina near Charleston. Alabama near Birmingham.
Texas is a bit of an outlier - the bluest bits are indeed near Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Austin/San Antonio, but the counties around Big Bend and El Paso as well.
Florida has long has a divide between the panhandle (rural and more culturally South) vs the more populous, prosperous and urban coastal/southern counties and that appears to play out here as well.
To be clear, I’m not saying there isn’t a correlation between urban/rural, or rich/poor, or blue/red, or any of those. Just that the situation is complicated and can’t be said to be any one of those things exactly, since there are many exceptions to each pattern. The actual root causes are likely correlated to those things, but are ultimately more complex. Smoothing things out and only looking at the state-level differences isn’t going to reveal these root causes.
Here’s an interesting paragraph from @Dr.Strangelove’s citation.
While lifespans have generally increased since 1980, a few pockets in America have actually seen decreasing life expectancy. 13 counties in the US have had falling life expectancy, 8 of which are in Kentucky and all of which are in the South. These counties are overwhelmingly white and have a high incidence of heart disease, cancer, and drug overdoses.
Decreasing lifespan is associated with white rurality. We know all about the opioid crisis. I wonder about the causes behind the heart disease and cancer claims. I think Kentucky was big in coal mining, which was never a healthy activity.
I can’t come up with a coherent thesis for why, but it does stand out that there’s something systemic going on when one smallish state accounts for 60+% of the declining counties.
Another link that discusses geographic disparities in the US.
In general, I like to argue that looking at the complexities of a situation provides deeper understanding, unless you get so tangled in the complexities that you come to no conclusion at all. The very interesting paper that @survinga cited is an example of the latter. To quote part of the Conclusion:
We have documented a sharp increase in state-level disparities in midlife mortality, a result consistent with an emerging epidemiological literature (Vierboom, Preston, and Hendi 2019; Montez et al. 2019). This divergence has contributed to a more unequal America; West Virginia’s midlife mortality rate is nearly double that in Minnesota. These widening geographic disparities in state-level mortality cannot be attributed to changing spatial patterns in education levels, income inequality, or rising deaths of despair. Instead, rising spatial inequality in midlife mortality results from some states experiencing dramatic overall declines in mortality across educational groups, while other states have experienced at best only modest progress.
Yet they do indeed ascribe the difference to the level of college-educated residents and to states with higher incomes.
Although states with high income have shown the way, states with lower income capacity are not inexorably constrained to rates of midlife mortality that rank among the worst in developed countries.
What the paper does state, multiple times, is that the gap in mortality is a fairly recent phenomena, not present as recently as 1994. The authors are particularly careful not to consider state politics or policies; I could not decide whether these were truly non-factors or whether they were excluded a priori. Federal Medicaid policy, however, is an exception: they document its links to lower levels of mortality over time. Levels of smoking, low cigarette taxes, and accessibility of opioids are also mentioned, but hospitals are entirely omitted.
My stance, even after reading the article, remains that I strongly disagree with you on the causes of lower lifespans in the south. Despite local exceptions, the correlation of lifespan to location is grossly explainable by political decision-making, mostly at the state rather than federal or local levels. The states with higher mortality could do more: they see the gains (or lower losses) in other states and refuse to replicate them, leaving their residents farther and farther behind. It’s a national disgrace, not an inexplicable riddle.
If states were really an important factor by themselves, we should see discontinuities on the borders. But we don’t: East Texas looks like Louisiana, while West Texas looks like New Mexico. North Florida looks like Georgia, while South Florida looks like any other coastal area.
Minnesota is looking pretty good… but so do the eastern Dakotas. In west South Dakota, we’ve got Oglala Lakota county in the pits, which a mentioned above is due to the (94%) Native American population. South Dakota is not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, and yet it looks quite a lot like its blue neighbor, ignoring the special cases of tribal lands.
What does this all mean? No idea, frankly, except that it appears to be more geographical than political.
Paul Krugman talks about declining life expectancies in the US, with a distinctly partisan spin (gift link):
If you don’t want to read it, a couple of big factors are the refusal to vaccinate against COVID (which accounts for the more recent divergence) and the refusal to expand Medicaid (which has been ongoing since the ACA came out).
This seems clearly false. Can you provide a cite for this claim? I would guess that the lack of a coherent healthcare system is a big part of it, and COVID is a big part of the recent drastic divergence. Inequality leads to more deaths of despair (drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicides), and the US is pretty unequal compared to other Western countries.
True. But …
There is a feedback loop between culture and politics. The culture in east Texas and in Louisiana is pretty indistinguishable. As is the racial and SES distribution. Which suggests the populace on each side of that border have similar health habits = bad, and elect similar politicians = bad.
Yes, Austin & Baton Rouge have different budgets and different priorities for public health measures. But to the degree Austin puts out more of whatever is beneficial than does Baton Rouge, they may well distribute it more towards other areas of the state than their most backwards. In a democracy, we don’t always give “to each according to their need”. We often give “to each according to how hard their rep fights for a bigger share.” The honorable rep from East Bumfuck Texas knows that one thing his constituents don’t want is e.g. an anti-smoking clinic in their town.
One of the big political battles we’re fighting right now all over Florida is that historically Tallahassee has left lots of stuff up to local control. So our wealthier, smarter, healthier counties could do what made sense to them and the poorer, more rural, more ignorant places could do what made sense to them.
Now, driven by some combo of ALEC and DeSantis, all that is under active assault and the clear intent is to draw all decision-making to Tallahassee and redneck-ify all of the civilized parts of Florida.