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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3931 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

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I would like to see more data. Besides cancer, there are several other modern improvements that should have increased life expectancy. Off the top of my head:

  1. Reductions in smoking (this should account for YEARS)
  2. Improved auto safety (U.S. auto fatalities per capita peaked in 1937)
  3. Statins
  4. Improvements for other diseases (miracle cure for Hep-C being a good example).

But perhaps this is offset by:

  1. The massive rise in obesity. Currently 11% of American adults are diabetic. That number rises to 29% of adults over 65.
  2. Drug overdose deaths (from near zero to 100,000+ per year)
  3. Increase in murders

Reductions in smoking (this should account for YEARS)

...

The massive rise in obesity. Currently 11% of American adults are diabetic. That number rises to 29% of adults over 65.

There may be a non-trivial tradeoff here.

Increase in murders

What numbers are we looking at here? Googling around the murder rates per capita for the US as a whole during the 1920s and 30s seem to generally trend higher than murder rates today, but those are just the easiest ones I've found and I could accept the methodology has changed to such an extent it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Can you share the data you've found? I was just speculating in my post and I could accept that murders were higher in the 1920s than now. Especially because people who were stabbed or shot would be more likely to die without a 911 system and quality medical care.

For the 1920s and 1930s, I was just going off of this which is just the source from the Wikipedia page.Since that data was from the NCHS, I then compared it to the rates for 2021 and 2022 from their dashboard, which showed 2021 and 2022 as being a bit lower than the averages for the 20s and 30s.

The numbers I saw from the first link seemed ballpark with the other ones I could find (The FBI crime data explorer only goes back to 1985 and tends to show lower rates across the board than the NCHS data, but is in the same ballpark and trends in the same direction by year).

Once again, just what I could find quickly off Google, not a rigorous analysis.

And yeah, not a commentary on rates of violence, just in terms of folks going in the ground.

Thanks! That data is so weird. What happened in 1904? The murder rate jumped from 1.3 to 4.9 just 4 years later! I suppose records from those years weren't great.

It looks like in the Post War period, the murder rate has jumped around a lot and we're sort of in the middle right now.

I'll go ahead and say that I was wrong. Although murder does have a significant affect on U.S. life expectancy, the change in the murder rate since 1920 hasn't lowered life spans.

Modern trauma care turns what would have been murders in the 70s into aggravated assaults. There's a downward trend from medical improvements.

That seems highly relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of violent crime, but less relevant when discussing the murder rate in terms of life expectancy.

Unless the argument is the life expectancy lost by the increased # of aggravated assaults outweighs the life expectancy gained by the decreased # of outright murders. Though I would not phrase that as life expectancy lost due to increase in murders.

Violence accounts for only a very small share of deaths.

The average murder victim probably loses like 50 years of life compared to the average cancer victim who only loses 5. Very ballpark numbers, but the total number of life years lost to violence is not totally insignificant.

3,389,088 died in the U.S. in 2022 of which 21,156 died by murder.

Applying a 10x factor to murder, we arrive at murders causing something like 6% of the total life years lost. Go ahead and apply a 5x factor instead if that's what you want, but you can't waive away murders.

Drug overdoses are worse though.

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