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The New York Times’ “Upshot” section has a long-running arrangement with economist Raj Chetty (who recently moved from Harvard to Stanford) to publicize his research on a vast trove of otherwise confidential IRS 1040 data without emphasizing the politically incorrect implications of his research.
Chetty has now posted a new paper on life expectancies by income across the country. The NYT reports on it:
The Rich Live Longer Everywhere. For the Poor, Geography Matters.
By NEIL IRWIN and QUOCTRUNG BUI APRIL 11, 2016
For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.
One conclusion from this work, published on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is that the gap in life spans between rich and poor widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century. They live longer almost without regard to where they live. Poor Americans had very little gain as a whole, with big differences among different places. …
“You want to think about this problem at a more local level than you might have before,” said Raj Chetty, a Stanford economist who is the study’s lead author.
“You don’t want to just think about why things are going badly for the poor in America. You want to think specifically about why they’re going poorly in Tulsa and Detroit,” he said, naming two cities with the lowest levels of life expectancy among low-income residents. …
It may be good to know that poor Americans are living a lot longer in some places than in others, but it would be better to know — in terms of specific policy prescriptions — how the places with better results are doing it.
Unfortunately, Chetty doesn’t actually know much about different parts of the country, and he seldom demonstrates much insight into how his methodology interacts with local conditions. Another big problem is that Chetty’s social engineering ambitions drive him toward over-implying that local policies drive geographic differences, when it’s pretty obvious that selection factors, such as race, are more important.
Chetty’s new paper is pretty interesting, particularly in how it rejects conventional liberal wisdom. Chetty writes:
Correlational analysis of the differences in life expectancy across geographic areas did not provide strong support for 4 leading explanations for socioeconomic differences in longevity: differences in access to medical care (as measured by health insurance coverage and proxies for the quality and quantity of primary care), environmental differences (as measured by residential segregation), adverse effects of inequality (as measured by Gini indices), and labor market conditions (as measured by unemployment rates). Rather, most of the variation in life expectancy across areas was related to differences in health behaviors, including smoking, obesity, and exercise. Individuals in the lowest income quartile have more healthful behaviors and live longer in areas with more immigrants, higher home prices, and more college graduates. …
Theories positing that differences in mortality are driven by the physical environment (eg, exposure to air pollution or a lack of access to healthy food) suggest that the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor individuals should be larger in more residentially segregated cities. Empirically, in areas where rich and poor individuals are more residentially segregated, differences in life expectancy between individuals in the top and bottom income quartile were smaller (r = −0.23, P = .09). Individuals in the bottom income quartile who lived in more segregated commuting zones had higher levels of life expectancy (r = 0.26, P = .04). …
As I pointed out last year in my long critical analysis of Chetty’s work, Moneyball for Real Estate, looking at the extremes of Chetty’s rankings are a good way to figure out for yourself what’s going on.
In the latest, places with long life expectancy for poor people tend to be extremely high cost of living cities, with New York #1 and Santa Barbara #2. Here’s his top ten “commuting zones” for long life expectancy among people who tell the IRS on their 1040s that they are in the bottom 25% of income.
Why do low income people have long life expectancies in extremely unwelcoming cities like New York?
The NYT flails about trying to explain the pattern:
A common thread among many of the places with a smaller longevity gap was population density, with wealthy cities leading the way. New York has a high rate of social spending for low-income residents and has been aggressive in regulating trans fats and smoking.
But, as a frequent (and highly observant) visitor explained about New York in 1978:
https://youtu.be/6oaO6rpPwUA?t=2m35s
New York and coastal California shed poor people who aren’t tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. (Plus, these look like a list of cities where a lot of income is off the books for tax purposes.)
In contrast, the top life expectancy cities for people in the top quarter of the income range look like Moynihan’s Law of the Canadian Border again, a bunch of cool weather and/or outdoor paradise cities:
And I wouldn’t be surprised if these were pretty honest towns where there is less income tax evasion.
The lowest life expectancy for the affluent is Las Vegas, which isn’t surprising. Way back in the 1970s, George Gilder liked to point out how different Utah and Nevada were in lifestyle.
Los Angeles has long life expectancy for its (mostly Mexican or Asian immigrant) poor, and short life expectancy for its affluent.
Angus Deaton, the latest Nobel Economics laureate, who kicked off the awareness of the White Death last fall, offers a technical critique here.
Then there are changes in life expectancy by “commuting zone” from 2001 to 2014:
Mr. Cutler, the Harvard economist, argues that the new research should serve as a jumping-off point.
“Why is it that Birmingham has done well but Tulsa has done poorly?” he said.
Probably little in terms of policy. The differences between Birmingham in Alabama and Tulsa and Oklahoma probably have more to do with overall racial trends in lifespans. The 21st Century has been good for the life expectancy of blacks, who aren’t murdering each other or killing each other with AIDS as much as they were 25 years ago. And the life expectancy of Mexicans has long been phenomenally high for their incomes and obesity levels. These days, Mexicans don’t shoot heroin, as Sam Quinones documents in Dreamland, they sell it.
In contrast, this has been a bad century for the life expectancies of working class whites, especially Scots-Irish, and American Indians. Birmingham has lots of blacks, while metro Tulsa has lots of Scots-Irish and as many American Indians as blacks.
The IRS gives Chetty 1040 data that has been (hopefully) anonymized, with no race data. Chetty attempts to adjust for the racial makeup of the region.
But I suspect he doesn’t have a good handle on the interaction effects of racial percentages and income.
In ultra-expensive Santa Barbara, for example, people in the bottom quarter of the national reported income distribution are probably either Latino service workers who are likely to leave for some place cheaper (such as Mexico) if they suffer a health setback, waitresses who aren’t reporting all their tips, or trust funders who are most in danger of death from being eaten by a Great White Shark while surfing.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I don’t know what Raj Chetty thinks a “commuter zone” is and can’t be bothered to find out at the moment. But under any conceivable definition, how can Newark anchor its own commuter zone? What about Jersey City?
It's not something Chetty came up with; it's used frequently by demographers and labor economist types.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @slumber_j
Interesting write-up, even for a person living outside the US. What caught my eye was:
In South Africa, for example, most of the non-VAT tax revenue is generated by whites. Especially large companies of course have ways of avoiding taxation. Many blacks and Indians just don’t bother declaring, and traditionally do most business under the table. The white desire for uncorrupted and altruistic gov institutions simply got gamed by the black gov in order to extract even more money from them. Afaik Indians are running the Dept. of Inland Revenue.
I think the Times’ explanation of why poor people live longer in NYC is correct. There are more homeless in Manhattan than any of the other boroughs. Why? Because Manhattan is where the money is. I have a pro bono client who lives in an all-women shelter at 84th and Broadway, which is a very nice area. She shares her room with her 3-y/o son. It’s Spartan, not to say ugly, but it’s functional. She gets several hundred dollars a month in benefits, and there is a day-care center in the shelter. She also has access to medical care. There can’t be many places in the US where a homeless person can live this well.
Most shelters aren’t like that, but (as opposed to a place like Detroit) they exist, and they have food.
I’ve met a lot of not-tough people in NYC, at all income levels. You can always exist here, even if you can’t thrive.
In A Study in Scarlet Conan Doyle described London as “that cesspool, into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” Something like that is going on with New York as well. There is no good place to be utterly destitute, but New York City is better than most.
Where? To where the dirt is most magical, of course.
“In contrast, this has been a bad century for the life expectancies of working class whites, especially Scots-Irish”
So life has been bad for Americans who draw their ancestry back to Protestant Belfast, but life has been good for Americans who draw their ancestry back to Catholic Dublin?
Having moved more than a few times in my lfe, if longevity is the objective, stay put and do what you can to improve your lifestyle there.
Your last line hints at what must be an important cause – the SWPL effect. New York, SF, LA, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Madison, Eugene, etc all have a lot of people who for the moment may have a low income but were raised in circumstances with a higher income and will probably have a higher income in the future. Their lifestyle, behaviors, and access to health care integrated over a lifetime don’t track their present income.
There seems to be a big push lately to get people to move into urban areas.
Santa Barbara is high on both lists and with a UC campus with it’s own surfer beaches that place seems to be truly blessed.
What is the life expectancy in, say, Broward County, Florida? For the exact answer, you would have to wait about 100 years until all the people now living in Broward County die, and compute the mean age at which they died. But how do you estimate what this life expectancy (mean age at death) will be, while most of these people are still alive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
says that what is used is _period_ life expectancy at birth (LEB), which is “the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed since birth until death of all their members to the mortality rates observed at a given year.” I can’t make sense of this, because the mortality rate in each future year is unknown, and might change greatly if a Singularity-like life-prolonging technology is discovered. Can someone please briefly explain this? In particular, what information is needed to estimate the life expectancy of a set of people who are not yet dead, and is this information derivable from Chetty’s IRS data?
First, you calculate the probability of surviving to year one.
S_001 = 1 - # deaths of people under 1 / # of births
Next, you calculate the probability of surviving to year two, given you have survived to year one:
S_002 = 1 - # deaths of people 1-2 / # of people aged 1-2
Etc.
Life expectancy is then:
LE = 1*S_01 + 2*S_002*S001 + 3*S_003*S_002*S_001 + etc up to 120 or so
This is the average lifespan of a hypothetical person who was exposed, over their life, to the death risks typical of people in Broward County in 2012.
Responding directly to your question, for "future years" they use the age-specific death rates of the baseline year. If you believe that age-specific death rates will fall in the future, then the life expectancy numbers you see calculated are underestimates.Replies: @Bill
I’m pretty much convinced at this point that LE differences within and between developed nations are almost entirely genetic.
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.
In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.
US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).
That way, if any group makes your conjecture look too implausible, you can always declare the country, region or class in question "not developed".
Cuba's longevity - the same as the US despite poverty - occurs for similar reasons.
There was a study about places where people live long - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone - and all of them had the same predictable things. Strong family bonds, moderate exercise, a sensible (often semi-vegetarian) diet, moderation. Social bonds are important - from whatever source they derive (religion, or tradition, communism etc). I think thats why Latinos have longer lives, compared to the atomised and directionless Whites that Linh Dinh writes about.Replies: @Jack D
http://www.nihb.org/docs/07102009/Navajo%20Nation%20Initial%20Response%20on%20NHCR.pdf
National Review will be happy to hear about the death of working class Whites.
It is only Whites who draw their ancestry back to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I am fine because I am Italian. Steve Sailer is fine as well because he is Swiss German. We are not screwed.Replies: @Buffalo Joe
What? A veritable lightning-bolt of lust for life surges through my age-ravaged body at the thought of living a year longer in New Yawk Siddee. Call Mayflower! Get my semi on the road! We be headed to Happiness is a Day Widdout a Mugging.
Sheeit. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…………………..
Can someone explain Springfield, MA on that list?
Chetty is pretty obviously reversing the causality arrow. He's discovering the places where people with good or bad habits live, and then attributing the outcome to this or that policy.
An observation from the old South was that it was better in many ways to live on the plantation as a slave than off the plantation as free (meaning white).
There is also a shortage of medical professionals in the US, so close proximity to them is very useful if you get very sick. I know people from upstate NY that used connections to have surgery done in NYC
The differences between top and bottom quartiles and between top cities and average (especially the latter) aren’t all that great. The Grim Reaper took billionaire Ed Snider yesterday at age 82 – he doesn’t care how rich you are when he comes for you. The 15 year difference between top and bottom 1% males is mostly accounted for by the fact that to be a bottom 1% male, you really have to be trying hard – you need to be an alcoholic or drug addict or otherwise live a very dysfunctional life.
Probably most of the difference is not due to the rich getting better health care but because they live a healthier life style. Smoking used to be distributed across all the social classes but in recent decades it’s really become associated with lower income groups. The motto among the upper classes is that you can never be too rich or too thin but among the food stamp crowd, morbid obesity is the in thing. This is a complete inversion from historic norms where being rich (“a fat cat”) was associated with being plump because the poor couldn’t afford to eat enough to be fat. If the government really wanted to narrow the gap, they would reform the food stamp program to force a healthy diet on the beneficiaries, but Big Corn wouldn’t let them and anyway they’d rather use the money to build more hospitals, etc.
My mom died a few years back just shy of 82. She did all the right stuff, didn't smoke, ate a balanced diet and responsibly--kept her figure trim--got exercise, kept herself mentally active with books, volunteering in libraries and my kids' schools. She was in overall good health, but had one issue and the hospital managed to kill her with the pain medication. All things considered, she should have been good for about 90 and i'd have loved for her to get to see my kids graduate college (last two this June), get married, maybe become a great-grandmom. But realistically 82 is a good run. And honestly whatever *personal* enjoyment someone's getting, almost no-one is doing anything all that interesting or productive above 80.
My dad hits 88 in a couple weeks, and if i could sign paperwork to get that--i'd do it in a heartbeat. Dying at 65 or 70--bummer. Even 75 seems like modest underperformance. But i don't know what great benefit i'd get out of limping out 90 or 95 over getting to say 85.
Unless we solve some of biochemistry of aging and really make 70 the new 30, a lot of this is just "who cares" bean counting.
What actually matters is the *quality* of that long run. And that depends much more critically on mundane stuff like who are you sharing the nation with? Smart, competent, self-reliant, cooperative people who share your language, culture, traditions and make life productive, pleasant and *meaningful*? Or foreigners, with different languages, religions, traditions making community life tribal and tedious.
It's just that corn is supposed to be pre-processed by cattle or hogs before you eat it. (It's carbs that are making Americans obese and ugly.)Replies: @Jack D
“The New York Times’ “Upshot” section has a long-running arrangement with economist Raj Chetty (who recently moved from Harvard to Stanford) to publicize his research on a vast trove of otherwise confidential IRS 1040 data without emphasizing the politically incorrect implications of his research.”
Why does he have access to 1040 data? I don’t recall signing anything on my 1040 saying that any information contained therein could be given to non-governmental entitites for their own purposes.
Calvinism is perhaps the most poisonous ideology that White people ever conceived and one that seemingly few can resist.
On the topic of the white death (via Drudge):
Austin Indiana HIV Outbreak
I’m struck by another aspect of the study. “Health care,” in study after study, pretty much boils down to “Don’t smoke, eat right, exercise, avoid toxic substances.”
Which leads me to the hypothesis that if we are going to socialize medical care, it should be for things like serious injury and illness. Otherwise we’re just subsidizing poor choices.
LOL. El Pendejo Steve has taken to censoring dissenting opinion. Bye, Stevie. Don’t let the adoring multitudes hit you on the backside.
Perhaps one of the reasons why lower income people tend to have longer life spans if they live in big cities, ceteris paribus for a lot of factors, is that big prosperous cities have a lot of top flight hospitals and clinics, and lower income people have Medicaid, and then everyone has Medicare once they pass 65.
In places like idaho if you are poor you are burning wood eating poached venisonhave zero wages during winter and 12 on the books summer youre maintaing a truck and its gas andthe house you built with salvaged materials they will laugh you out of the welfare or ss office if youre breathing youre not disabled.
OT, but 60 Minutes showed that members of the Saudi government basically funded and facilitated the 9/11 attacks. I knew some of this before, but not the full range of evidence:
http://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/
It looks like the range is between 75.6 (in Pecos, TX) and 83.4 (in Glenwood Springs, CO).
I don’t know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.
I just visited county seat Port Townsend, and it is a nice place in the Olympic rain shadow with mild weather, lush rainforests nearby and even the world's northernmost cactus.
The people are indeed poor by urban standards, but they are surrounded by a wealth of natural beauty and bounty. Deer wander through neighborhoods, the streams are full of trout and salmon, and you can toss a crab pot off a dock and come back a few hours later to find a half dozen dungeness.
The houses in town are of the Victorian style, and little old churches stand on every other block.
It's the kind of place that makes you want to stay alive. Not much beats a sunset over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I'd rather live there on 30k than in Manhattan on 100.
I think people live longest in places they are genetically adapted to. NW European whites are adapted to places like Jefferson County, so they live longer there than in places like East Texas.Replies: @AnotherDad
Perhaps you will feel differently when you are 75 years old, friend. Unless your plan is to just escape old age altogether and die young.
here in nyc we have more than hospitals we have a free limousine service for the indigent to get to the care providers they just call up for a car then swipe their medicaid card. we have nursing homes for the impoverished community organizers get money to build them staff them and rob them blind and the community gets free nursing for elderly, we have several medical facilities on every poor block pharmacies where you can get your prescription for sneakers filled and clinics that pay you to see them. The healthy habits of the rich rub off a bit its as common to see a ebt card being swiped for organics as red bull and cheetos. oh yeah there sure is a lot of off the books money renting rooms and apartments,gypsi cabs restaurant work crime crime construction maintenance half the poor are illegal and while they still get all services without fear on the books is for suckers pays low and taxes witheld off the books 10-20 hr easy money.
In places like idaho if you are poor you are burning wood eating poached venisonhave zero wages during winter and 12 on the books summer youre maintaing a truck and its gas andthe house you built with salvaged materials they will laugh you out of the welfare or ss office if youre breathing youre not disabled.
I don't know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.Replies: @Jack D, @Bill, @Bill P, @anon
I don’t think you would say this if you were 75. My MIL is about to turn 94 and is still in reasonably good shape, lives in her own house, etc. Between 75 and 84 (and beyond) she was traveling the world, playing golf, having a great time. Remember the numbers are (I assume) medians – the point at which HALF the people in a certain group are dead, which means that the other half are very much alive. There are literally MILLIONS of people in the US who are over age 90, so at 75 many of them have another decade or 2 left in them (average life expectancy at 75 is about 12 years, meaning that 1 out of 2 will still be alive at 87) and many of them are probably enjoying life more than you are. They are done raising kids and working, maybe have a nice pension and can really enjoy life.
Enjoying life more than I am now, in my '60's? Actually, I'm enjoying life more than at any other time in my life, because I don't have the stress of accomplishing my goals or raising my family, but I can feel the physical clock winding down. The purpose of life is not to live as long as possible: if I check out at any point between 75 and 83 I would consider that a full and generous lifespan (this is even assuming I live that long; I feel lucky already.)Replies: @stillCARealist, @E. Rekshun
Interesting that he moved to Stanford. I’d like to see his next paper cover the difference in housing costs between Cambridge and Palo Alto. I wonder if he received a housing allowance.
I agree with Jack D. Also, life expectancy is a proxy for a lot of other things. If your life expectancy is 85 at age 40, then compared to someone whose life expectancy is 70 at age 40, your quality of life, health-wise, is going to be a hell of lot better between 40 and 70 than his. As in, you won’t be completely disabled, or have limbs amputated for diabetes, or be bedridden with emphysema, etc.
In the next story coming out about Chetty’s, we will find out that San Francisco is the best place to move if you want to become Asian. It’s probably because of educational policy in that city that so many kids turn out that way.
Yes, I was expecting such a comment and I stand by it. By chance I’ve had to take care of a lot of family and acquaintances in their ’70’s, ’80’s, and ’90’s. Most of them did not have much money and weren’t going anywhere. In rare instances they remained mentally active and had loved ones nearby, and especially grandchildren to light up their lives. However, many did not, and ended their lives lonely, enfeebled, and in care facilities that robbed them of their dignity. The lucky ones checked out on their own terms. Let’s not romanticize old age.
Enjoying life more than I am now, in my ’60’s? Actually, I’m enjoying life more than at any other time in my life, because I don’t have the stress of accomplishing my goals or raising my family, but I can feel the physical clock winding down. The purpose of life is not to live as long as possible: if I check out at any point between 75 and 83 I would consider that a full and generous lifespan (this is even assuming I live that long; I feel lucky already.)
You speak truth for many. My dad passed away at 82 and for about the last 5 years or so he was fairly miserable and rather a burden to my mom. If I could identify what it was that he could have done differently for himself, I'll sum it up thus: pay attention to the diet and exercise advice doctors give you in later age. He was told to cut out the salt, but he just couldn't. He was told to lose weight, but he just couldn't. He was told to exercise regularly (anything, even a daily walk) but again, a lifetime of sedentary overeating just couldn't be changed when it really mattered. So it was diabetes, a pacemaker, mountains of pills, oxygen, constant doctor visits, falls, and just constant neediness.
Old age will catch up with us all eventually and no matter how thin and fit we were, we'll keel over when our time is come. But there's some lifestyle choices we can make to ease the approach of the great change.Replies: @Buffalo Joe
In 1993, my Dad retired at 55 living on investments and a small pension ($300/mo) plus ss at 62, in a relatively low cost of living, warm weather community. He retired on $250K conservatively invested net worth. Several times he exclaimed that retirement has been the best time of his life and doubled his net worth during retirement! At 78, he still lives actively and independently in his own home; though I first began to notice some physical and cognitive decline when he hit 75.
The reason why the affluent live so much longer than the poor has nothing to do with location, or with access to top-notch medicine. Medicine in the early 21rst Century is actually extremely primitive, and makes almost no impact on longevity. Medicine cannot even find a permanent cure for the Flu, or control simple inflammatory conditions like arthritis and asthma. The most that medicine can give you in terms of longevity is 2-3 years with terrible quality of life, where you are plugged to an I.C.U machine 24/7 and unable to walk or even move.
The reason why affluent live so much more is because they tend to be more intelligent, and intelligent people take much better care of themselves than stupid people. At our primitive current scientific state, what makes the most difference in longevity are diet and bad habits. You never see the rich eating pork rinds, or drinking to a stupor, or smoking 2 packs a day. Obesity is much more pervasive among those of the lower and lower-middle classes than among the rich. The rich also tend to have certain traits such as self-restraint. They tend to be harder on themselves than the indigent. They see hedonistic indulgement as a vice of character. This is the greatest paradox: those with the resources to indulge themselves to death almost never do, as they excel at self-restraint, while those who lack the ability to indulge themselves to death wish they could. This is one of the reasons why so many men who become multi-millionaires through sports tend to self-destroy and lose everything in a few years, as these men are usually not very intellectally capable of evaluating the consequences of their actions, unlike people who made their wealth through their brains.
This contrast is most obvious in men. One of the biggest differences between men is short-term orientation vs long-term orientation. About half of men are short-term oriented while the other half tend to be long-term oriented. This is NOT related to K-selection and R-selection. It is not related to timidity and levels of anxiety. Many men who excel in traits such as courage, tenacity and aggressivness are long-term oriented. Rome’s first emperor, Octavian Augustus, was long-term oriented. So was Napoleon. Long-term orientation correlates with intelligence; nevertheless, high intelligence itself INDUCES long-term orientation in men even when their personality tends towards impetuousness and high levels of impulsiveness. If you look at a Wall Street broker and a street thug, they share a lot in common such as aggressiveness, impulsiveness and courage. However, the street thug is far more likely to try crack and become addicted to it. So what separates them? In a word: intelligence. The Wall Street broker is much smarter than the street thug, so he can understand better the long-term consequences of trying crack and becoming addicted to it. Intelligence works as a “break” for the worst male instincts. Men have a strong tenency to self-destroy compared to women, but highly intellignent men have almost female levels of concern for their health.
My mother, who is in her high '90's, was reading, practicing the piano, and learning new pieces, arguing with me about things in the books and magazines I brought her, and discussing the films, TV shows, audiobooks, and music I would play for her. Also gardening. She is highly intelligent. I also had her living three blocks away from me. I gave her a reason to stay sharp and she gave me a reason to stay sharp, too (although I am over 3 decades younger.)
But the fact is most people don't have any of that when they get into their '70's and beyond. At least, most of the ones I have known. A number have no surviving spouse. Surviving children are not as common as you would expect. Those children rarely visit, often living several states away. They have no intellectual interests to sharpen, no one to keep them on their toes. Even in the case of someone as extraordinarily lucky as me, with my mother, the crash inevitably comes.
We were talking earlier about "enjoying life." Well, part of enjoying life means not being stressed out all the time for sure. But a bigger part I think is having to do something, and having someone to share it with. I think that's easier for intelligent older people to set goals for themselves, but even more important is that person who cares about what you are doing. When you are old, you usually have outlived most of your family, friends, peers, not to mention spouses, and so, unless you are lucky, such persons are rare.
Don't get out much, do you?
Newark . . . you won’t live any longer, but it will seem much longer (bah doom-boom!).
Lol, I find it fascinating that Springfield, MA is in the top 10 for life expediencies for the top quartile. The city itself is certainly nothing special. Land prices in the area are cheap, but that’s all I would say Springfield has going for it. It’s certainly no “outdoor paradise” city,though I’ll admit it is relatively close to the Canadian border
Inquiring Minds, Newark is where the people from Trenton go to vacation. Seriously, I lose a year off of my life just driving through Newark or Trenton.
and/or outdoor paradise cities
Magic dirt!
All this obesity is fueling an explosion in adult onset diabetes. Also called Type 2 Diabetes. When the obese are the lower classes the taxpayers pay for their diabetes. IIRC diabetes is the fasted growing medicaid spending at about 20%.
Commuting zones are “clusters of U.S. counties that are characterized by strong within-cluster and weak between-cluster commuting ties” (from http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/data/resource/detail/1709).
It’s not something Chetty came up with; it’s used frequently by demographers and labor economist types.
The magic dirt theory, apparently.
Differences in life expectancy across the country are driven by the same factors that drive all the other regional differences: genetic differences between the people. This includes racial and ethnic differences (Blacks and Scots Irish being short-lived; Asians, Hispanics, Scandinavians being long-lived), but also includes sorting within groups (which leads to the urban-rural divide as well as the boiling off effect from the poorest areas).
See:
HBD is Life and Death – The Unz Review
More Maps of the American Nations – The Unz Review
Greg Cochran’s latest is also relevant:
Bugs Versus Drift | West Hunter
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).Replies: @JayMan, @5371, @AshTon, @Twinkie, @Anonymous
For developed nations, yup.
In Europe, there is an apparently formula:
Early European Farmer ancestry correlates to longer lifespan.
Indo-European ancestry (especially Slavic and Celtic) correlates to shorter lifespan.
Moorish/North African ancestry also correlates to shorter lifespan.
All of these are apparently correlated with length of time to adapt to agriculture. Out of the bunch, the Early European Farmers had the longest history with agriculture. I suspect agricultural pathogens play a role.
Enjoying life more than I am now, in my '60's? Actually, I'm enjoying life more than at any other time in my life, because I don't have the stress of accomplishing my goals or raising my family, but I can feel the physical clock winding down. The purpose of life is not to live as long as possible: if I check out at any point between 75 and 83 I would consider that a full and generous lifespan (this is even assuming I live that long; I feel lucky already.)Replies: @stillCARealist, @E. Rekshun
SPM,
You speak truth for many. My dad passed away at 82 and for about the last 5 years or so he was fairly miserable and rather a burden to my mom. If I could identify what it was that he could have done differently for himself, I’ll sum it up thus: pay attention to the diet and exercise advice doctors give you in later age. He was told to cut out the salt, but he just couldn’t. He was told to lose weight, but he just couldn’t. He was told to exercise regularly (anything, even a daily walk) but again, a lifetime of sedentary overeating just couldn’t be changed when it really mattered. So it was diabetes, a pacemaker, mountains of pills, oxygen, constant doctor visits, falls, and just constant neediness.
Old age will catch up with us all eventually and no matter how thin and fit we were, we’ll keel over when our time is come. But there’s some lifestyle choices we can make to ease the approach of the great change.
The reason why affluent live so much more is because they tend to be more intelligent, and intelligent people take much better care of themselves than stupid people. At our primitive current scientific state, what makes the most difference in longevity are diet and bad habits. You never see the rich eating pork rinds, or drinking to a stupor, or smoking 2 packs a day. Obesity is much more pervasive among those of the lower and lower-middle classes than among the rich. The rich also tend to have certain traits such as self-restraint. They tend to be harder on themselves than the indigent. They see hedonistic indulgement as a vice of character. This is the greatest paradox: those with the resources to indulge themselves to death almost never do, as they excel at self-restraint, while those who lack the ability to indulge themselves to death wish they could. This is one of the reasons why so many men who become multi-millionaires through sports tend to self-destroy and lose everything in a few years, as these men are usually not very intellectally capable of evaluating the consequences of their actions, unlike people who made their wealth through their brains.
This contrast is most obvious in men. One of the biggest differences between men is short-term orientation vs long-term orientation. About half of men are short-term oriented while the other half tend to be long-term oriented. This is NOT related to K-selection and R-selection. It is not related to timidity and levels of anxiety. Many men who excel in traits such as courage, tenacity and aggressivness are long-term oriented. Rome's first emperor, Octavian Augustus, was long-term oriented. So was Napoleon. Long-term orientation correlates with intelligence; nevertheless, high intelligence itself INDUCES long-term orientation in men even when their personality tends towards impetuousness and high levels of impulsiveness. If you look at a Wall Street broker and a street thug, they share a lot in common such as aggressiveness, impulsiveness and courage. However, the street thug is far more likely to try crack and become addicted to it. So what separates them? In a word: intelligence. The Wall Street broker is much smarter than the street thug, so he can understand better the long-term consequences of trying crack and becoming addicted to it. Intelligence works as a "break" for the worst male instincts. Men have a strong tenency to self-destroy compared to women, but highly intellignent men have almost female levels of concern for their health.Replies: @SPMoore8, @5371, @Jack D
Some of these generalizations make sense, others don’t. I think the high correlation between affluence/intelligence and longevity is that people who are well off (or intelligent) usually have a lot of things to do, well into old age.
My mother, who is in her high ’90’s, was reading, practicing the piano, and learning new pieces, arguing with me about things in the books and magazines I brought her, and discussing the films, TV shows, audiobooks, and music I would play for her. Also gardening. She is highly intelligent. I also had her living three blocks away from me. I gave her a reason to stay sharp and she gave me a reason to stay sharp, too (although I am over 3 decades younger.)
But the fact is most people don’t have any of that when they get into their ’70’s and beyond. At least, most of the ones I have known. A number have no surviving spouse. Surviving children are not as common as you would expect. Those children rarely visit, often living several states away. They have no intellectual interests to sharpen, no one to keep them on their toes. Even in the case of someone as extraordinarily lucky as me, with my mother, the crash inevitably comes.
We were talking earlier about “enjoying life.” Well, part of enjoying life means not being stressed out all the time for sure. But a bigger part I think is having to do something, and having someone to share it with. I think that’s easier for intelligent older people to set goals for themselves, but even more important is that person who cares about what you are doing. When you are old, you usually have outlived most of your family, friends, peers, not to mention spouses, and so, unless you are lucky, such persons are rare.
This article could be summed up in a single truism: You can deny reality all you like, but you are still subject to it.
Which leads me to the hypothesis that if we are going to socialize medical care, it should be for things like serious injury and illness. Otherwise we're just subsidizing poor choices.Replies: @Chase
Of course, that is what the rabbits want.
A few thoughts and observations. I strongly suspect that one reason why the “poor” live longer in New York and California (which accounts for 7 of the 10 best places for poor men to grow old) is that these people are living more cheaply thanks to NYC’s rent control and California’s Prop 13. If you bought a home before property values skyrocketed or if you live with the same rent since 1975, then even though you’re technically poor and could never afford to move into your current neighborhood, you’re better off than a homeowner in Detroit or Gary.
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).Replies: @JayMan, @5371, @AshTon, @Twinkie, @Anonymous
[I’m pretty much convinced at this point that LE differences within and between developed nations are almost entirely genetic.]
That way, if any group makes your conjecture look too implausible, you can always declare the country, region or class in question “not developed”.
As Steve say, just another Whitopia kind of place. In 2000, the racial makeup of the Springfield MSA was 83.50% White, 5.96% African American.
And the whites are of a better, more educated sort than the whites you would get in say W. Virginia. Massachusetts comes out near the top on most educational rankings. Our modern tendency is to lump all whites together but don’t forget that northern whites and southern whites were once so different that they were willing to fight a war with each other.
Race is such an overwhelming factor in American life that it can serve as a proxy for many other things – health, income, crime rate, etc. So if you fail to discount for race in any sociological study (as Chetty did) you basically render it meaningless – all he is accomplishing is listing the whitest places. This is like saying that moving to Detroit makes you more likely to commit a crime.
And the whites are of a better, more educated sort than the whites you would get in say W. Virginia. Massachusetts comes out near the top on most educational rankings.
Go wander through much of Springfield, or even better its large suburb of Holyoke, and get back to me on the Whitopia part. Deal?
PeterReplies: @Brutusale, @Jack D
Were they willing to fight a war with each other because they were genetically different or because of their different personal circumstances? I would tend to think it had more to do with their circumstances.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
The reason why affluent live so much more is because they tend to be more intelligent, and intelligent people take much better care of themselves than stupid people. At our primitive current scientific state, what makes the most difference in longevity are diet and bad habits. You never see the rich eating pork rinds, or drinking to a stupor, or smoking 2 packs a day. Obesity is much more pervasive among those of the lower and lower-middle classes than among the rich. The rich also tend to have certain traits such as self-restraint. They tend to be harder on themselves than the indigent. They see hedonistic indulgement as a vice of character. This is the greatest paradox: those with the resources to indulge themselves to death almost never do, as they excel at self-restraint, while those who lack the ability to indulge themselves to death wish they could. This is one of the reasons why so many men who become multi-millionaires through sports tend to self-destroy and lose everything in a few years, as these men are usually not very intellectally capable of evaluating the consequences of their actions, unlike people who made their wealth through their brains.
This contrast is most obvious in men. One of the biggest differences between men is short-term orientation vs long-term orientation. About half of men are short-term oriented while the other half tend to be long-term oriented. This is NOT related to K-selection and R-selection. It is not related to timidity and levels of anxiety. Many men who excel in traits such as courage, tenacity and aggressivness are long-term oriented. Rome's first emperor, Octavian Augustus, was long-term oriented. So was Napoleon. Long-term orientation correlates with intelligence; nevertheless, high intelligence itself INDUCES long-term orientation in men even when their personality tends towards impetuousness and high levels of impulsiveness. If you look at a Wall Street broker and a street thug, they share a lot in common such as aggressiveness, impulsiveness and courage. However, the street thug is far more likely to try crack and become addicted to it. So what separates them? In a word: intelligence. The Wall Street broker is much smarter than the street thug, so he can understand better the long-term consequences of trying crack and becoming addicted to it. Intelligence works as a "break" for the worst male instincts. Men have a strong tenency to self-destroy compared to women, but highly intellignent men have almost female levels of concern for their health.Replies: @SPMoore8, @5371, @Jack D
[You never see the rich … drinking to a stupor]
Don’t get out much, do you?
Don’t know about Alabama but being from CA it seems clear immigrants eat healthier diets than do native born poors.
This is always noticeable when discussing “food deserts”
There are a bunch of universities in the area. Offhand I suspect there are a lot of academic hangers-on with low incomes but relatively virtuous health habits. Notice that Steamboat Springs in Colorado has excellent health outcomes compared to Denver, apparently because the poor ski bums in Steamboat have a healthier lifestyle than the urban poor in Denver.
Chetty is pretty obviously reversing the causality arrow. He’s discovering the places where people with good or bad habits live, and then attributing the outcome to this or that policy.
The reason why affluent live so much more is because they tend to be more intelligent, and intelligent people take much better care of themselves than stupid people. At our primitive current scientific state, what makes the most difference in longevity are diet and bad habits. You never see the rich eating pork rinds, or drinking to a stupor, or smoking 2 packs a day. Obesity is much more pervasive among those of the lower and lower-middle classes than among the rich. The rich also tend to have certain traits such as self-restraint. They tend to be harder on themselves than the indigent. They see hedonistic indulgement as a vice of character. This is the greatest paradox: those with the resources to indulge themselves to death almost never do, as they excel at self-restraint, while those who lack the ability to indulge themselves to death wish they could. This is one of the reasons why so many men who become multi-millionaires through sports tend to self-destroy and lose everything in a few years, as these men are usually not very intellectally capable of evaluating the consequences of their actions, unlike people who made their wealth through their brains.
This contrast is most obvious in men. One of the biggest differences between men is short-term orientation vs long-term orientation. About half of men are short-term oriented while the other half tend to be long-term oriented. This is NOT related to K-selection and R-selection. It is not related to timidity and levels of anxiety. Many men who excel in traits such as courage, tenacity and aggressivness are long-term oriented. Rome's first emperor, Octavian Augustus, was long-term oriented. So was Napoleon. Long-term orientation correlates with intelligence; nevertheless, high intelligence itself INDUCES long-term orientation in men even when their personality tends towards impetuousness and high levels of impulsiveness. If you look at a Wall Street broker and a street thug, they share a lot in common such as aggressiveness, impulsiveness and courage. However, the street thug is far more likely to try crack and become addicted to it. So what separates them? In a word: intelligence. The Wall Street broker is much smarter than the street thug, so he can understand better the long-term consequences of trying crack and becoming addicted to it. Intelligence works as a "break" for the worst male instincts. Men have a strong tenency to self-destroy compared to women, but highly intellignent men have almost female levels of concern for their health.Replies: @SPMoore8, @5371, @Jack D
Ironic that you should mention crack. In fact, prior to the popularization of crack in the ’80s, cocaine and Wall Street bankers were associated with each other. Bankers love the rush and they (along with Hollywood stars and pro athletes) were just about the only ones who could afford this expensive powder. Crack on the other hand was relatively affordable so it attracted ghetto types. The difference was not intelligence but access to funds.
But isn't intelligence what gave them the ability to accumulate and access those funds?
Port St. Lucie (#10) is a nearly all white town on Florida’s Atlantic Coast.
Rush Limbaugh uses “Port St. Lucie,” as a euphemism for “white trash.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
says that what is used is _period_ life expectancy at birth (LEB), which is "the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed since birth until death of all their members to the mortality rates observed at a given year." I can't make sense of this, because the mortality rate in each future year is unknown, and might change greatly if a Singularity-like life-prolonging technology is discovered. Can someone please briefly explain this? In particular, what information is needed to estimate the life expectancy of a set of people who are not yet dead, and is this information derivable from Chetty's IRS data?Replies: @Bill, @keypusher, @Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
You pick a base year, often the latest year for which you have good data. Say 2012. I’m going to ignore some details . . .
First, you calculate the probability of surviving to year one.
S_001 = 1 – # deaths of people under 1 / # of births
Next, you calculate the probability of surviving to year two, given you have survived to year one:
S_002 = 1 – # deaths of people 1-2 / # of people aged 1-2
Etc.
Life expectancy is then:
LE = 1*S_01 + 2*S_002*S001 + 3*S_003*S_002*S_001 + etc up to 120 or so
This is the average lifespan of a hypothetical person who was exposed, over their life, to the death risks typical of people in Broward County in 2012.
Responding directly to your question, for “future years” they use the age-specific death rates of the baseline year. If you believe that age-specific death rates will fall in the future, then the life expectancy numbers you see calculated are underestimates.
I don't know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.Replies: @Jack D, @Bill, @Bill P, @anon
That’s not how life expectancy works. That 7.8 years difference does not have to come at the end. It could come anywhere. Chetty calculates life expectancy at age 40. It could be that 100% of the difference between Pecos and Glenwood Springs arises from mortality rate differences at age 41 and that none of the difference arises from differences at later ages.
In fact, when you are told about places/times with really low life expectancy, like 35, that’s almost always because that place/time has sky high infant mortality. There would still be plenty of old people in those societies, just many more tiny graves.
But let's look at that 7 year disparity in another way. As noted, it won't be about infant mortality. And it won't be about cancer either, otherwise we'd be getting headlines about "Cancer Threat in Pecos County."
So it's probably about heart failure, and the conditions that lead to heart failure. Part of that is genetic, part of that is lifestyle. In my own community, which is mostly working class, but which has average mortality, what causes death? Well, a half dozen twentysomethings OD every year. Then, starting in their fifties or sixties, people just start checking out. Why?
Well, the first thing is that when people are no longer sexually attractive and involved in that particular dance, and when they are no longer raising children, they don't know what to do with themselves. So, from what I have seen, they start getting fat and drinking. And that leads to all kinds of breakdowns, as some have already itemized.
Of course this doesn't apply to everybody, but it applies in general to people who are only average and don't have any intellectual interests or hobbies to keep them motivated or keep them busy. So I would imagine that the real disparity is between people in, say, Pecos County dropping dead of heart attacks or heart failure in their fifties an sixties at a higher rate than say, some county in Colorado, and that accounts for the difference.
Now then you can say: Well, we really need to do something about Pecos County. Why? These people know what they're doing. But this gets back to the supposed glories of old age. A lot of these people don't know what to do with themselves, that's the sad truth.Replies: @Bill
I don't know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.Replies: @Jack D, @Bill, @Bill P, @anon
My neighboring Jefferson County WA tops 84 for poor people, who are overwhelmingly white of British and Germanic ancestry.
I just visited county seat Port Townsend, and it is a nice place in the Olympic rain shadow with mild weather, lush rainforests nearby and even the world’s northernmost cactus.
The people are indeed poor by urban standards, but they are surrounded by a wealth of natural beauty and bounty. Deer wander through neighborhoods, the streams are full of trout and salmon, and you can toss a crab pot off a dock and come back a few hours later to find a half dozen dungeness.
The houses in town are of the Victorian style, and little old churches stand on every other block.
It’s the kind of place that makes you want to stay alive. Not much beats a sunset over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I’d rather live there on 30k than in Manhattan on 100.
I think people live longest in places they are genetically adapted to. NW European whites are adapted to places like Jefferson County, so they live longer there than in places like East Texas.
First, you calculate the probability of surviving to year one.
S_001 = 1 - # deaths of people under 1 / # of births
Next, you calculate the probability of surviving to year two, given you have survived to year one:
S_002 = 1 - # deaths of people 1-2 / # of people aged 1-2
Etc.
Life expectancy is then:
LE = 1*S_01 + 2*S_002*S001 + 3*S_003*S_002*S_001 + etc up to 120 or so
This is the average lifespan of a hypothetical person who was exposed, over their life, to the death risks typical of people in Broward County in 2012.
Responding directly to your question, for "future years" they use the age-specific death rates of the baseline year. If you believe that age-specific death rates will fall in the future, then the life expectancy numbers you see calculated are underestimates.Replies: @Bill
Chetty calculates these at age 40, so you start with S_041 and LE starts LE = 40 + 1*S_041 + …
If Chetty had a clue, he would grasp lower income NYC zip codes like projects on the lower East Side, Washington Heights and Harlem are practically 3rd world in terms of health and longevity. They are rife with obesity,dysfunctional poverty, broken families, chronic unemployment, drug use and the violence that comes with it. Manhattan is only bailed out by a solid chunk of ridiculously wealthy people from Tribeca up to 96th Street. And many of those people have 2nd homes in more hospitable climate, or eventually move out altogether to get away from NY’s confiscatory taxes as they get older. Do you still count people in Florida, other points south and west and the Hamptons after they moved away? Further significant wealth will always correlate with good health via better diet, access to better health care and simply taking better care of one’s self. Upstate NY has some beautiful and healthful places to live, but few with any good economic prospects. So it’s practically depopulated.
“National Review will be happy to hear about the death of working class Whites.”
It is only Whites who draw their ancestry back to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I am fine because I am Italian. Steve Sailer is fine as well because he is Swiss German. We are not screwed.
From 2002, a Princeton study found that:
Someone with 20th percentile income in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, or San Diego can live quite a nice, low stress, and pleasant life IF they inherit a house. Food, heating, and AC costs in these cities is below the national average.
I’m not sure what percentage of lower income residents of these cities have substantial inherited wealth, but you do meet them all the time. There are $750,000+ houses owned by elderly people everywhere here, and somebody is certainly inheriting them when they die.
Some poor people in San Francisco also have rent controlled apartments 80% below market rates.
AC costs in San Francisco is low because it never gets too hot and too cold in the city by the bay.
"Some poor people in San Francisco also have rent controlled apartments 80% below market rates."
At the same time San Francisco is one of the few cities in the country where you can be paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month in rent and still be living in a 3rd world high crime gangbanger territory. San Francisco is such an expensive city to live that even the hood here is overpriced.
Its cheaper to live in a middle class White neighborhood in Orlando, than it is to live in a underclass NAM neighborhood in San Francisco.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
says that what is used is _period_ life expectancy at birth (LEB), which is "the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed since birth until death of all their members to the mortality rates observed at a given year." I can't make sense of this, because the mortality rate in each future year is unknown, and might change greatly if a Singularity-like life-prolonging technology is discovered. Can someone please briefly explain this? In particular, what information is needed to estimate the life expectancy of a set of people who are not yet dead, and is this information derivable from Chetty's IRS data?Replies: @Bill, @keypusher, @Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Deaton addressed this in the article at Steve’s link. Hope this is helpful.
This from Deaton was interesting:
Rather mealy-mouthed of the professor.
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).Replies: @JayMan, @5371, @AshTon, @Twinkie, @Anonymous
That’s ridiculous. During the Greek dictatorship, all the Greek communists were shipped there. That’s the reason why they live so long. I’ve been there. When you drive around you see KKE (greek communist party) graffiti is everywhere. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ed-vulliamy/ikaria-reply-to-anthony-on-secret-of-longevity
Cuba’s longevity – the same as the US despite poverty – occurs for similar reasons.
There was a study about places where people live long – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone – and all of them had the same predictable things. Strong family bonds, moderate exercise, a sensible (often semi-vegetarian) diet, moderation. Social bonds are important – from whatever source they derive (religion, or tradition, communism etc). I think thats why Latinos have longer lives, compared to the atomised and directionless Whites that Linh Dinh writes about.
Mexico has impressively long lifespans, but still slightly shorter than the USA. Central American life expectancies are horrifically short. Latinos (esp. Mexicans) may outlive the US life expectancy, but I doubt they outlive *white* US life expectancies.
I don’t buy that genetics is always as big a factor as Anatoly and JayMan insist. Just as with birthrates, we’ve seen pretty wide swings in these numbers in the *same populations* within decades or even years of each other – see post-Soviet Russia for life expectancies, for example. Culture matters, and it can have a huge impact on behavior that affects life expectancy. The Scotch-Irish with supposedly low life expectancies aren’t genetically much different from ethnic groups with higher than average life expectancies.
Costa Rica, a civilized middle-income country but still far short of the sort of healthcare you would find in the US or Western Europe, has an LE of almost 80 - almost a year higher than the US.
But look at the numbers for Springfield itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Massachusetts#Demographics
Almost a quarter of Springfield’s population is black, and over a third, Hispanic of whatever official race. People of Puerto Rican background make up almost a third of the city’s total population and that percentage may increase due to Puerto Rico’s recent financial problems:
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/01/census_data_shows_large_number.html
Also, Springfield’s per capita income ($18,133) is barely over half that of the Massachusetts state average ($35,763) and less than half of Boston’s ($40,593).
There must in fact, be other explanations for these differences in life expectancies.
Isn’t there a Seventh-Day Adventist community in Socal that’s known for being long-lived?
There is also a shortage of medical professionals in the US, so close proximity to them is very useful if you get very sick. I know people from upstate NY that used connections to have surgery done in NYCReplies: @Buffalo Joe
George, Upstate NY has Upstate Medical at Syracuse U, Strong Memorial with Rochester U Medical School and there are three hospitals associated with the U of Buffalo Medical School, including Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Your friends should have stayed closer to home or considered the three hour drive to the Cleveland Clinic. Medical care is very good at this end of the state.
I don't know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.Replies: @Jack D, @Bill, @Bill P, @anon
“I don’t know if I would get too worked up about this. I mean, the 7.8 years between 75.6 and 83.4 is hardly prime real estate.”
Perhaps you will feel differently when you are 75 years old, friend. Unless your plan is to just escape old age altogether and die young.
I don’t know, but if Bergen County, NJ is part of his NYC commuter zone, it’s worth noting that, 10 years ago, a Harvard study found Asian American women there had the highest life expectancy in the US, at 91: http://www.worldhealth.net/news/asian_women_in_bergen_have_nation_s_top_/
As Steve say, just another Whitopia kind of place. In 2000, the racial makeup of the Springfield MSA was 83.50% White, 5.96% African American.
And the whites are of a better, more educated sort than the whites you would get in say W. Virginia. Massachusetts comes out near the top on most educational rankings.
Go wander through much of Springfield, or even better its large suburb of Holyoke, and get back to me on the Whitopia part. Deal?
Peter
I suppose if you want to ignore race, and deny IQ then magic dirt is all you have. Its kinda like foo foo dust, Voodoo Economics Lives Again! That old grey mare she ain’t what she used to be. That nag just nags all day now. The paper of record has become a broken record. Is it the 1960s or the 1970s? It sure ain’t the 1980s, cause Voodoo Economics didn’t sound stupid then did it?
This outsourcing thing is sure getting out of hand. Indians aren’t very good at call centers, but they suck even worse at economics. Third World countries that don’t have indoor plumbing is not where I’d look for economic advice, but then I’m not stupid. That violin music is beginning to get annoying. Hard to feel sorry for brown when your own relatives are having trouble paying the bills.
My White Privilege says brown doesn’t look good here. It just clashes with my Civilization. Say what you will about clinging to Bibles and Guns, but Civilization in a non-negotiable issue for me.
“Our modern tendency is to lump all whites together but don’t forget that northern whites and southern whites were once so different that they were willing to fight a war with each other.”
Were they willing to fight a war with each other because they were genetically different or because of their different personal circumstances? I would tend to think it had more to do with their circumstances.
Agree. Past a certain age … it’s just not that exciting.
My mom died a few years back just shy of 82. She did all the right stuff, didn’t smoke, ate a balanced diet and responsibly–kept her figure trim–got exercise, kept herself mentally active with books, volunteering in libraries and my kids’ schools. She was in overall good health, but had one issue and the hospital managed to kill her with the pain medication. All things considered, she should have been good for about 90 and i’d have loved for her to get to see my kids graduate college (last two this June), get married, maybe become a great-grandmom. But realistically 82 is a good run. And honestly whatever *personal* enjoyment someone’s getting, almost no-one is doing anything all that interesting or productive above 80.
My dad hits 88 in a couple weeks, and if i could sign paperwork to get that–i’d do it in a heartbeat. Dying at 65 or 70–bummer. Even 75 seems like modest underperformance. But i don’t know what great benefit i’d get out of limping out 90 or 95 over getting to say 85.
Unless we solve some of biochemistry of aging and really make 70 the new 30, a lot of this is just “who cares” bean counting.
What actually matters is the *quality* of that long run. And that depends much more critically on mundane stuff like who are you sharing the nation with? Smart, competent, self-reliant, cooperative people who share your language, culture, traditions and make life productive, pleasant and *meaningful*? Or foreigners, with different languages, religions, traditions making community life tribal and tedious.
I haven’t looked at the detail in the paper itself, but a lot of the interpretation of the reported results are going to hang on what’s being controlled for, and how.
For example, on the NY Times map of the US, it is said that:
If this applies to the ranking of the cities as well, then many interpretations of the data in this comment thread don’t apply.
I wonder, for example, what being tn the lowest or highest quarter of income means here: relative to the city itself, relative to the country as a whole? It makes a big difference.
It’s not strictly toughness– in Newark or Miami it can be politically useful to have a lot of older poor people around. I don’t think the same play figures in Santa Barbara/Rosa by which it is more a reflection of just how static, conservative those burgs are. Marin County still has its USDA progressive requirement of poor even though they don’t matter spending- or voting-wise.
I don't buy that genetics is always as big a factor as Anatoly and JayMan insist. Just as with birthrates, we've seen pretty wide swings in these numbers in the *same populations* within decades or even years of each other - see post-Soviet Russia for life expectancies, for example. Culture matters, and it can have a huge impact on behavior that affects life expectancy. The Scotch-Irish with supposedly low life expectancies aren't genetically much different from ethnic groups with higher than average life expectancies.Replies: @RolfDan, @Jack D, @Anatoly Karlin
Latinos in the US live two years longer than non-Latino whites.
And the whites are of a better, more educated sort than the whites you would get in say W. Virginia. Massachusetts comes out near the top on most educational rankings.
Go wander through much of Springfield, or even better its large suburb of Holyoke, and get back to me on the Whitopia part. Deal?
PeterReplies: @Brutusale, @Jack D
Yeah, they don’t call Route 91 the San Juan Highway for no reason! I don’t know where Jack got his numbers, but they aren’t even close to correct.
Santa Barbara has its share of bums, but there are a lot of people who live there who, while technically poor in the sense they don’t have a large income, have substantial family resources. When I lived there it seemed like every time I ran into some waitress living in a house with five roommates I’d discover her parents owned a multimillion dollar house in Hope Ranch or Montecito.
A lot of the poor people you see in Santa Barbara don’t live there – they commute from places like Oxnard or Santa Ynez, so when they die it’s not going to show up in Santa Barbara’s numbers.
Back when I lived there, the trust funders were in far more danger from the prodigious amounts of coke they snorted than creatures from the deep. Like any area where truly wealthy people congregate, there’s a fairly large group of their ne’er-do-well progeny trying to top each other’s hedonist adventures.
Enjoying life more than I am now, in my '60's? Actually, I'm enjoying life more than at any other time in my life, because I don't have the stress of accomplishing my goals or raising my family, but I can feel the physical clock winding down. The purpose of life is not to live as long as possible: if I check out at any point between 75 and 83 I would consider that a full and generous lifespan (this is even assuming I live that long; I feel lucky already.)Replies: @stillCARealist, @E. Rekshun
I’m enjoying life more than at any other time in my life, because I don’t have the stress of accomplishing my goals or raising my family, but I can feel the physical clock winding down.
In 1993, my Dad retired at 55 living on investments and a small pension ($300/mo) plus ss at 62, in a relatively low cost of living, warm weather community. He retired on $250K conservatively invested net worth. Several times he exclaimed that retirement has been the best time of his life and doubled his net worth during retirement! At 78, he still lives actively and independently in his own home; though I first began to notice some physical and cognitive decline when he hit 75.
Cuba's longevity - the same as the US despite poverty - occurs for similar reasons.
There was a study about places where people live long - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone - and all of them had the same predictable things. Strong family bonds, moderate exercise, a sensible (often semi-vegetarian) diet, moderation. Social bonds are important - from whatever source they derive (religion, or tradition, communism etc). I think thats why Latinos have longer lives, compared to the atomised and directionless Whites that Linh Dinh writes about.Replies: @Jack D
In animal studies, one of the few ways they have found to increase longevity is to keep the animals on a near-starvation diet. Communism is great for reducing the average calorie intake of the population if nothing else.
BTW, corn–and there isn’t really any “big corn”, even the big producers number in the 10s of the thousands of farmers–is *great* stuff for you to eat.
It’s just that corn is supposed to be pre-processed by cattle or hogs before you eat it. (It’s carbs that are making Americans obese and ugly.)
Mexicans live a long time.
Isn't that because they're shorter on average? Short people's hearts don't have to work as hard as tall people's. Gravity is relentless.
Oh, and a lot a black folks are huge, both vertically and horizontally.
The less there is of someone, the less there is to go wrong.
I strongly suspect it is because he is using the Springfield SMA (which is much of Western Massachusetts) and not just the city of Springfield itself, but I’m too lazy to check.
For example, on the NY Times map of the US, it is said that:If this applies to the ranking of the cities as well, then many interpretations of the data in this comment thread don't apply.
I wonder, for example, what being tn the lowest or highest quarter of income means here: relative to the city itself, relative to the country as a whole? It makes a big difference.Replies: @Steve Sailer
In a low cost of living area like Greater Tulsa, sickly poorish people move there to stretch their fixed incomes a little further. In contrast, poor people who can’t hustle for a buck anymore move out of Santa Barbara because otherwise they’d go broke and be sleeping under the Moreton Bay Fig tree downtown.
There is a McDonald's i hit about once a week halfway between the house and the office and there is always a bum (fifties, half grey, scraggly)at the drive thru exit. I figure he's gotta make a living just from the highway folk and the locals are on to him, but he's there 90% of the mornings i get my 99 Cent breakfast sandwich. I was joking around yesterday that i bet he works till 9am and then has enough to have a decent lifestyle, for values of decent., and does have he have a car hidden a block away?. the only sucky part of this life is that you cant be too clean shaven or well groomed.
have also been told that a hard winter leads the shiftless to migrate to south TX,, but we haven't had particularly cold or wet winters the last few years. That and open enough shelters and they're like like golf courses and you get the Canada geese effect of their never leaving,
Why does he have access to 1040 data? I don't recall signing anything on my 1040 saying that any information contained therein could be given to non-governmental entitites for their own purposes.Replies: @Whiskey
Laws are just for suckers … er the “little people” per Leona Helmsley, Hillary! and numerous others. The whole point of being an elite, elected by God to be saved as part of the uber-hip SWPL crowd, is ignoring laws for the greater good of non-racialist salvation or some other such idiot religious nonsense.
Calvinism is perhaps the most poisonous ideology that White people ever conceived and one that seemingly few can resist.
If you consider the difference in amounts spent on health care in the US vs Mexico (vast) vs. the difference in life expectancy (negligible) it makes you wonder what we are getting for all that health care spending. What’s worse is that the trend lines are converging (in 1960 there was a 12 year difference vs less than 2 today) and it’s not inconceivable that in a few years the average Mexican will outlive the average American.
The difference was not intelligence but access to funds.
But isn’t intelligence what gave them the ability to accumulate and access those funds?
“Do you still count people in Florida, other points south and west and the Hamptons after they moved away?”
I couldn’t make out how Chetty’s methodology deals with the manifold effects of moving.
NPR — Terri Gross — Fresh Air — Today:
Having a “black” given name shortens your lifespan. Blacks with white or Biblical names live longer. An actual government funded academic argues this in a paper; describing it, she asserts at one point that if your name is Elijah (but not Elijah Mohammed) you would scientifically have to sit up straighter in school.
Can we get a response from Dr Chetty about how being named Raj clearly means he will die seven years earlier than if his name was Caleb?
I just visited county seat Port Townsend, and it is a nice place in the Olympic rain shadow with mild weather, lush rainforests nearby and even the world's northernmost cactus.
The people are indeed poor by urban standards, but they are surrounded by a wealth of natural beauty and bounty. Deer wander through neighborhoods, the streams are full of trout and salmon, and you can toss a crab pot off a dock and come back a few hours later to find a half dozen dungeness.
The houses in town are of the Victorian style, and little old churches stand on every other block.
It's the kind of place that makes you want to stay alive. Not much beats a sunset over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I'd rather live there on 30k than in Manhattan on 100.
I think people live longest in places they are genetically adapted to. NW European whites are adapted to places like Jefferson County, so they live longer there than in places like East Texas.Replies: @AnotherDad
Thoroughly agree with that. Olympic Peninsula a very special place. (Though i prefer to be here on the Cascade side for general “getting around” purposes.)
I think this is probably true as a general principle. But for the record the piney woods of East Texas is not a terrible place. Hotter summers than white people are best adapted to, but not a terrible place at all. The problem is the racial demographics–NAM heavy. Plus the cultural “toolkit” of the backwoods white folks that settled and stayed there. (The sort of folks having problems with “white death” now, with their culture, traditions and family life having gone through the shredder.) Drive out the NAMs and do a little cultural therapy and eugenics on the white population and whites would be doing fine off in the piney woods.
It's not something Chetty came up with; it's used frequently by demographers and labor economist types.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @slumber_j
But it is hard to look up additional data from commuting zones from other sources, whereas Census data from fairly similar metro areas are readily available on the Internet. I usually just assume that the metro area is basically the same as the commuting zone, so it’s not a big problem for me, but it’s another little thing that makes it harder for outsiders to critically engage with Chetty’s work.
It's just that corn is supposed to be pre-processed by cattle or hogs before you eat it. (It's carbs that are making Americans obese and ugly.)Replies: @Jack D
Big Corn is not the farmers, who make diddly, it is the big agriprocessors such as ADM who make “value added” products such as high fructose corn syrup. That box of corn flakes that you pay $3.79 for – the farmers get around 10 cents.
The main driver of obesity is that Americans consume too much damn food period. You can tinker with the mix of carbs vs protein vs fat but if you are consuming 3,000 calories every day and only burning 2,000 then the rest is going to stay on you as body fat and you’ll keep getting fatter and fatter and fatter just like a corn fed sow. You can live on a high carb diet and not be fat if the calorie count is low enough – the traditional European diet of the poor was mostly bread (I laugh at all the people who claim to be “gluten sensitive” when their ancestors probably lived on a virtually all bread diet – if gluten could kill you their family would have died out centuries ago) but they weren’t fat because they couldn’t afford enough calories to BE fat.
Santa Barbara is the closest humans will ever come to a supernatural paradise on Earth.
I always laugh when Steve says the Bay Area is possibly the inherently best place created for human habitation. Living in the Valley I guess he didn’t take the PCH from Malibu to SB when he went to SF or (Allah forbid) the awful suburban SV areas.
Were they willing to fight a war with each other because they were genetically different or because of their different personal circumstances? I would tend to think it had more to do with their circumstances.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
They weren’t all so willing. Consider the NYC draft riots.
And the whites are of a better, more educated sort than the whites you would get in say W. Virginia. Massachusetts comes out near the top on most educational rankings.
Go wander through much of Springfield, or even better its large suburb of Holyoke, and get back to me on the Whitopia part. Deal?
PeterReplies: @Brutusale, @Jack D
The numbers I gave (which I suspect but can’t confirm Chetty used as his definition) were for the Springfield “MSA”, which are all of Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin Counties – the entire western third of the state (excluding Berkshire County) from border to border. If he was using just the City of Springfield (a post-industrial dump) it wouldn’t make sense.
I'm not sure what percentage of lower income residents of these cities have substantial inherited wealth, but you do meet them all the time. There are $750,000+ houses owned by elderly people everywhere here, and somebody is certainly inheriting them when they die.
Some poor people in San Francisco also have rent controlled apartments 80% below market rates.Replies: @Jefferson, @Bill
“Someone with 20th percentile income in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, or San Diego can live quite a nice, low stress, and pleasant life IF they inherit a house. Food, heating, and AC costs in these cities is below the national average.”
AC costs in San Francisco is low because it never gets too hot and too cold in the city by the bay.
“Some poor people in San Francisco also have rent controlled apartments 80% below market rates.”
At the same time San Francisco is one of the few cities in the country where you can be paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month in rent and still be living in a 3rd world high crime gangbanger territory. San Francisco is such an expensive city to live that even the hood here is overpriced.
Its cheaper to live in a middle class White neighborhood in Orlando, than it is to live in a underclass NAM neighborhood in San Francisco.
I don't buy that genetics is always as big a factor as Anatoly and JayMan insist. Just as with birthrates, we've seen pretty wide swings in these numbers in the *same populations* within decades or even years of each other - see post-Soviet Russia for life expectancies, for example. Culture matters, and it can have a huge impact on behavior that affects life expectancy. The Scotch-Irish with supposedly low life expectancies aren't genetically much different from ethnic groups with higher than average life expectancies.Replies: @RolfDan, @Jack D, @Anatoly Karlin
I remember seeing a documentary about an Indian tribe whose membership straddled the the Mexico/ New Mexico border. The ones that ended up in Mexico spent their days toiling in the fields and eating the traditional corn and bean based diet and were skinny. Their cousins in the US ate junk food in front of the TV and were obese and diabetic.
1. On the Mexican side, the tribe comprised of mostly peasants. They did toil in the fields, but the important distinction was that they did not drive much. On the U.S. side, the tribe members had more cars, and drove everywhere.
2. They had somewhat similar diets on both sides of the border, but on the Mexican side, as you point out they ate more corn and bean; on the U.S. side, they ate more (processed) cheese.
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).Replies: @JayMan, @5371, @AshTon, @Twinkie, @Anonymous
The East Asian-Hispanics-white-black pattern in the U.S. persists in some traits such as life expectancy as well as marriage and (low) divorce rates (see this nifty graph: http://flowingdata.com/2016/03/30/divorce-rates-for-different-groups/). But then in other areas (IQ, law-abidingness, education, etc.) the East Asian-white-Hispanic-black pattern holds.
Having a "black" given name shortens your lifespan. Blacks with white or Biblical names live longer. An actual government funded academic argues this in a paper; describing it, she asserts at one point that if your name is Elijah (but not Elijah Mohammed) you would scientifically have to sit up straighter in school.
Can we get a response from Dr Chetty about how being named Raj clearly means he will die seven years earlier than if his name was Caleb?Replies: @Jack D
IIRC correctly, in Freakonomics they determine the best kind of name to have in the US is an Israeli name. If you name your kid Ori or Eilan or Ronit (btw Israelis give their kids names like space aliens even though there is a rich fund of traditional biblical names – these are thought to reek of the Diaspora too much) then they will grow up to be really rich. The worst names to give your kids (aside from invented names like D’Shavious) are nicknames (Johnny, Tony) as their official birth names – this is a sign of extreme trailer trashiness. John Edwards real name is Johnny.
How to maximize your life expectancy:
For males:
Step 1. Become East Asian.
Step 2. Become high IQ/affluent enough to buy a house in Fairfax County, VA.
For females:
Step 1. Become East Asian
Step 2. Become high IQ/affluent enough to buy a house in Bergen County, NJ.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14786805/ns/health-aging/t/where-you-live-can-decide-how-long-you-live/#.VwwhNOTmqUk
What are “agricultural pathogens?”
Only from an American perspective could an Ikarian diet be regarded as near starvation. Summer on the island is one traditional feast after another. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average American was nutritionally starved – cattle in Europe get better quality food than humans in the US.
I saw the same documentary. A couple of slight clarifications:
1. On the Mexican side, the tribe comprised of mostly peasants. They did toil in the fields, but the important distinction was that they did not drive much. On the U.S. side, the tribe members had more cars, and drove everywhere.
2. They had somewhat similar diets on both sides of the border, but on the Mexican side, as you point out they ate more corn and bean; on the U.S. side, they ate more (processed) cheese.
If you look at the map on the NY Times website, what you are saying seems to be true. You can go to the area around Springfield, put your cursor over it, and see that it does indeed include the entire Five Colleges area and more.
This obviously affects the numbers greatly.
Again, race also seems to be controlled for, though it would be good to see exactly how that is done (based on overall national proportions?)
hustling isn’t that bad in Tulsa, the weather has 6 nice months Months spring and fall and the winters are 75% nice days, and only june-aug are miserable, but livable if you hydrate.
There is a McDonald’s i hit about once a week halfway between the house and the office and there is always a bum (fifties, half grey, scraggly)at the drive thru exit. I figure he’s gotta make a living just from the highway folk and the locals are on to him, but he’s there 90% of the mornings i get my 99 Cent breakfast sandwich. I was joking around yesterday that i bet he works till 9am and then has enough to have a decent lifestyle, for values of decent., and does have he have a car hidden a block away?. the only sucky part of this life is that you cant be too clean shaven or well groomed.
have also been told that a hard winter leads the shiftless to migrate to south TX,, but we haven’t had particularly cold or wet winters the last few years. That and open enough shelters and they’re like like golf courses and you get the Canada geese effect of their never leaving,
As usual, the big-wig researchers want to avoid race and ethnicity as much as possible. So, what simple factors might they be missing?
Off the top of my head, I think they may be overlooking the difference in life-expectancy between Hispanics and blacks. IIRC, Hispanics have a surprisingly high life-expectancy, while blacks have a low life-expectancy. I strongly suspect most of the difference is genetic, although violence and health behaviors probably contribute.
Therefore, if you are looking at life-expectancy for the poor, it will depend very much on whether the poor you are looking at are Hispanic or black. Where the poor are mostly Hispanic, life-expectancy will be “good” and where the poor are mostly black, life-expectancy will be “bad”.
Looking at Steve’s table, the “good” life-expectancies for the poor are heavily in California and Florida where the poor are heavily Hispanic. This is supportive. (Not sure about NY.)
This would be simple to check. Add the ratio of Hispanic to blacks in the local population as an explanatory variable and see if it is important.
Haven’t checked the Chetty paper yet, he might have done this (he is pretty thorough sometimes).
Chetty does adjust life-expectancy for race and ethnicity, so my top-of-the-head comment is probably wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Update:
Chetty does adjust life-expectancy for race and ethnicity, so my top-of-the-head comment is probably wrong.
Chetty claims to adjust for race/ethnicity of the regions, but he doesn’t have individual data except what’s on a 1040, so no race/ethnicity at the individual level. He adjusts using national figures for different races’ behavior, but that misses local interactions. For example, a high proportion of Hispanic poor people in the expensive places like NYC, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco tend to be sojourners who are there to work hard and save up money.
If they don’t have the health or energy to make it there, they move some place cheaper. Cheaper places with warm weather tend to collect poor people who can’t make it in expensive hustler cities.
There’s a bunch of things like this going on with Chetty’s data that he is pretty clueless about.
Chetty does adjust life-expectancy for race and ethnicity, so my top-of-the-head comment is probably wrong.Replies: @Steve Sailer
But his adjustments are drawn from national figures and miss local interaction effects.
I don’t want to be too critical because he’s much improved his work since 2013 in the directions I’ve suggested. But I’m going to keep up explaining what’s really going on with his findings because I obviously have a better knack for grasping how his methodologies interact with local American realities, plus I have more freedom of expression because I don’t care about being Hillary’s or Jeb’s advisor.
“Ironic that you should mention crack. In fact, prior to the popularization of crack in the ’80s, cocaine and Wall Street bankers were associated with each other. Bankers love the rush and they (along with Hollywood stars and pro athletes) were just about the only ones who could afford this expensive powder. Crack on the other hand was relatively affordable so it attracted ghetto types. The difference was not intelligence but access to funds”
Crack and cocaine are exactly the same molecule. Crack is just cocaine cooked with a salt such as sodium bicarbonate to give a low smoking temperature so that a large amount of the cocaine can be smoked before liquifying. Basic organic chemistry.
As for your argument, the rates of cocaine addiction, clinical treatment and incarceration for cocaine-related problems among Wall Street brokers is much lower than that for the lower classes.
Your argument is invalid.
People say it's discriminatory to distinguish between crack and powder cocaine, but we distinguish distilled from non-distilled beverages. We also distinguish between 50cc scooters and superbikes. Frankly put, one is more dangerous than the other.
Personally, I don't think cocaine would be a big deal if people only chewed it like the Andean Indians, but I guess that isn't good enough for some of us.
But I'm sure you're right about the bankers. You can't exactly function as a rational decision maker when you're a cokehead. If bankers abused any drug, it would most likely be alcohol to dial down the pressure at the end of the day. Cocaine is really a pretty worthless drug for creativity and focus. If anything, in small doses it might have some beneficial effect on physical performance, i.e. staying alert and invigorated during a forced march or grueling ball game. But like most drugs, its cognitive benefits are dubious at best.
Illegal drugs are like any other business - you have to provide the product in a form that is effective and affordable to your target customer. Selling little vials of crack to the 99% turned out to be a much better business model than selling powdered cocaine to the 1%.
You are right, of course. I was riffing on the notion of the Golden Years for my own purposes, since I have several cases of physical and cognitive decline in front of me, at several different decades.
But let’s look at that 7 year disparity in another way. As noted, it won’t be about infant mortality. And it won’t be about cancer either, otherwise we’d be getting headlines about “Cancer Threat in Pecos County.”
So it’s probably about heart failure, and the conditions that lead to heart failure. Part of that is genetic, part of that is lifestyle. In my own community, which is mostly working class, but which has average mortality, what causes death? Well, a half dozen twentysomethings OD every year. Then, starting in their fifties or sixties, people just start checking out. Why?
Well, the first thing is that when people are no longer sexually attractive and involved in that particular dance, and when they are no longer raising children, they don’t know what to do with themselves. So, from what I have seen, they start getting fat and drinking. And that leads to all kinds of breakdowns, as some have already itemized.
Of course this doesn’t apply to everybody, but it applies in general to people who are only average and don’t have any intellectual interests or hobbies to keep them motivated or keep them busy. So I would imagine that the real disparity is between people in, say, Pecos County dropping dead of heart attacks or heart failure in their fifties an sixties at a higher rate than say, some county in Colorado, and that accounts for the difference.
Now then you can say: Well, we really need to do something about Pecos County. Why? These people know what they’re doing. But this gets back to the supposed glories of old age. A lot of these people don’t know what to do with themselves, that’s the sad truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
says that what is used is _period_ life expectancy at birth (LEB), which is "the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed since birth until death of all their members to the mortality rates observed at a given year." I can't make sense of this, because the mortality rate in each future year is unknown, and might change greatly if a Singularity-like life-prolonging technology is discovered. Can someone please briefly explain this? In particular, what information is needed to estimate the life expectancy of a set of people who are not yet dead, and is this information derivable from Chetty's IRS data?Replies: @Bill, @keypusher, @Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Thank you, Bill (and keypusher). Your explanation is clearer than Wikipedia’s.
Crack on the other hand was relatively affordable so it attracted ghetto types. The difference was not intelligence but access to funds
Not true at all, it’s all made from the same raw cocaine kilo bricks brought in from South America.
Crack is insanely expensive, as is meth. But crack is just a more potent, short-lived and explosive high because of the way that it is ingested (smoking) after heating to liquid form with addition of baking soda (and maybe other chemicals). And crack dealers are always willing to sell tiny $10 rocks in the open and on the street, a powder cocaine dealer isn’t going to waste his time for less than $60 or $120 worth.
Gun Violence Spiked — And Arrests Declined — In Chicago Right After The Laquan McDonald Video Release
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-violence-spiked-and-arrests-declined-in-chicago-right-after-the-laquan-mcdonald-video-release/
Mexicans live a long time.
Isn’t that because they’re shorter on average? Short people’s hearts don’t have to work as hard as tall people’s. Gravity is relentless.
Oh, and a lot a black folks are huge, both vertically and horizontally.
The less there is of someone, the less there is to go wrong.
Not exactly. Cocaine is “cracked” from its base (cocaine HCL) to yield crack cocaine, which vaporizes at a low temperature and is much more readily absorbed by the lungs and mucosa, therefore giving its inhaler a very direct dose to the brain via the pulmonary veins and carotid artery. It’s a much quicker and more efficient delivery system, so you get a much bigger bang for your buck.
People say it’s discriminatory to distinguish between crack and powder cocaine, but we distinguish distilled from non-distilled beverages. We also distinguish between 50cc scooters and superbikes. Frankly put, one is more dangerous than the other.
Personally, I don’t think cocaine would be a big deal if people only chewed it like the Andean Indians, but I guess that isn’t good enough for some of us.
But I’m sure you’re right about the bankers. You can’t exactly function as a rational decision maker when you’re a cokehead. If bankers abused any drug, it would most likely be alcohol to dial down the pressure at the end of the day. Cocaine is really a pretty worthless drug for creativity and focus. If anything, in small doses it might have some beneficial effect on physical performance, i.e. staying alert and invigorated during a forced march or grueling ball game. But like most drugs, its cognitive benefits are dubious at best.
It’s funny you should say that. I once read an article in one of the mainstream press outlets. Don’t remember which one. It was about Germans and their predilection for nudism. They quoted one older Eastern German woman who’d been baring it all for decades. She said something to the effect that Communism was better because since reunification there were so many fat people it wasn’t fun to get naked any more.
That’s what got lost in the Obamacare debate. The quality of your health care system is only the third most important factor in longevity. The first is public health systems, like water and sanitation (that’s the big one). The second is the habits of the populace, i.e. what they eat and how much activity they get. Only after that comes the health care system.
We’re paying for heart surgeries on people who should have gone another twenty years before they had problems because they have bad habits. If the Mexicans had clean air and water they’d probably live longer than we do.
Okinawan men used to be the longest living among the Japanese... after the introduction of Western-style fast food (Okinawa got McDonald's before Tokyo did) and a more sedentary lifestyle, they now have the shorted life expectancy in Japan (though Okinawan women are still the longest living Japanese women).
As you say, once the modern sanitation system is introduced, the biggest factor, aside from genetics, is dietary/activity factor.The incentive structure in the new insurance system ("Obamacare") is perverse.
I apologize (in advance) for all the parentheses:
While Springfield and maybe Pittsfield (as gothically visualized by Gregory Crewdson) have been economically depressed (relative to eastern/coastal MA), the greater Berkshires have a large crunchy crowd of NYC migrants/retirees (think Bernie Sanders) and Trustees tote-bag-toting Yankee boomers (basically, a James Taylor audience).
Their homes in this region (including the healthy dark blue southern Vermont strip) may or may not be their primary residence. This could partially account for the unexpected number.
Also what Boomstick said:
The Berkshires are summer paradise for the middle aged and well cultured.
You speak truth for many. My dad passed away at 82 and for about the last 5 years or so he was fairly miserable and rather a burden to my mom. If I could identify what it was that he could have done differently for himself, I'll sum it up thus: pay attention to the diet and exercise advice doctors give you in later age. He was told to cut out the salt, but he just couldn't. He was told to lose weight, but he just couldn't. He was told to exercise regularly (anything, even a daily walk) but again, a lifetime of sedentary overeating just couldn't be changed when it really mattered. So it was diabetes, a pacemaker, mountains of pills, oxygen, constant doctor visits, falls, and just constant neediness.
Old age will catch up with us all eventually and no matter how thin and fit we were, we'll keel over when our time is come. But there's some lifestyle choices we can make to ease the approach of the great change.Replies: @Buffalo Joe
CARealist, And that is why , regardless of the weather here in WNY, I make my daily two mile, 40 minute walk. Knees too shot to jog, but walking is good.
It is only Whites who draw their ancestry back to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I am fine because I am Italian. Steve Sailer is fine as well because he is Swiss German. We are not screwed.Replies: @Buffalo Joe
Jefferson, My dad died tragically young in a car accident, but my aunts and uncles on both sides lived well into their late eighties and low nineties, maybe the Mediterranean diet helped.
I am sorry about your dad. There is a small town in Pennsylvania called Roseto, which is predominantly Italian. They have a very healthy population.
https://youtu.be/Q7M3vFmysU8
https://youtu.be/ZoNNlCYI7sk
It's not something Chetty came up with; it's used frequently by demographers and labor economist types.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @slumber_j
Thanks for that. Perhaps that’s actually true of Newark and its hinterland with respect to New York, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to me.
Not exactly the same molecule. Crack is the “free base” – the pure cocaine molecule while powdered cocaine is the salt – cocaine hydrochloride. The powder is not smokable – it it will decompose before it volatilizes, but the free base boils into a vapor at only 90C and so can be smoked. Smoking is a very effective form of administration compared to snorting. The free base is more fat soluable so it crosses the blood-brain barrier more effectively. The smoker gets a much bigger kick all at once so that a small rock (perhaps only $10 worth or $5 back in the day) provides an effective (if brief) high while the same amount of powdered cocaine does not provide the same kick.
Illegal drugs are like any other business – you have to provide the product in a form that is effective and affordable to your target customer. Selling little vials of crack to the 99% turned out to be a much better business model than selling powdered cocaine to the 1%.
One thing I haven’t seen is that NYC is one of the few places you can get around without a car. More walking–>less flab.
The same applies to Santa Monica and San Francisco.
Absolutely! The health care system really only helps at the margins for the population as a whole (though, obviously, it can make HUGE differences in individual cases, e.g. when I got hurt in SE Asia, I was medevac’d to Singapore, then back to the States).
Okinawan men used to be the longest living among the Japanese… after the introduction of Western-style fast food (Okinawa got McDonald’s before Tokyo did) and a more sedentary lifestyle, they now have the shorted life expectancy in Japan (though Okinawan women are still the longest living Japanese women).
As you say, once the modern sanitation system is introduced, the biggest factor, aside from genetics, is dietary/activity factor.
The incentive structure in the new insurance system (“Obamacare”) is perverse.
One of the things I recommend un-athletic middle aged folks who want to lose weight is to get a dog. Walk that beast every day twice a day, at least 45 minutes to an hour.
Adult onset diabetes can be Type 1 too. Rare, but it happens.
“Jefferson, My dad died tragically young in a car accident, but my aunts and uncles on both sides lived well into their late eighties and low nineties, maybe the Mediterranean diet helped.”
I am sorry about your dad. There is a small town in Pennsylvania called Roseto, which is predominantly Italian. They have a very healthy population.
David French has an article on that http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433920/white-working-class-deaths-spiritual-crisis
Loss of identity and heritage. That means loss of direction and destiny. It means loss of immunity to anti-white PC and degenerate pop culture.
In the past, even during hard times, white people had identity and moral values of family, community, and church. Now, they are not allowed to have identity, and their only culture is garbage on TV that promotes degeneracy like tattoos, sexual licentiousness, mindless violence, drugs, and etc.
Lena Dunham and Emma Sulkowicz are lucky cuz they were born to privilege. If they were born poor, they'd be meth-heads by now.
American style spirituality is now more harmful than beneficial. Christianity does have historical roots in Europe, but that has been lost. Europeans are now totally secular, and American spirituality is rootless. It is all about Jeeeeesus or 'jesus is for gay marriage'. So, even though the church might offer uplift to some people, it provides no blood-and-guts core of identity. And their kids grow up in a culture of blandness and grow bored. So, they eventually turn to pop culture and whoriness. Notice that MANY whores and punks are from Christian background.
Also, Christian morality may say NO to vices but fails to encourage YES to creativity, expression, and etc. It is about "you can't do that" than "you can do this". Boring Christians are content with sticking with goody-goody morality, but more creative and expressive types eventually grow bored and turn to other stuff, often Liberal in nature since expressive culture is dominated by Libs. It's people who express who define culture. People who don't do bad things may be good people, but they don't shape and command the culture scene.
The only thing that can save white folks in troubled communities is revival of identity, heritage, and community. Spirituality can help, but it needs to be ethno-spirituality like what Jews got. For Jews, spirituality is inseparable from Jewish identity, covenant, Jewish experience, Jewish history, and etc. So, Jewish spirituality makes Jews feel special.
In contrast, American Christianity says a white American Christian should feel closer to some recent Somali convert to Jesus than with this fellow racial brethren who may be neo-pagan or secular. In contrast, even a religious Jew feels closer to a secular Jew by blood than with Christian Zionists who sing hosannas to Israel.
In the long run, American-style Christianity is destructive to the soul.
Jews have a different mindset. Jews feel close to each other by blood and spirit. Jews don't believe that they must identify first and foremost with Africans, Asians, or others.
Strong identity is necessary for pride, and that is what people need for good health, esp in bad times.
If white folks need spirituality, they need to reject Christianity and come up with new conversation with God. White folks need their own covenant with God. If God can have a special covenant with Jews, why not with another people? Instead of one message for all people --- what Christianity and Islam offers ---, let there be a different message for each people. Jews believe there is only ONE GOD but this God has a special message for Jews. If Jews see nothing wrong with that, then there should be nothing wrong with the idea that God has a special message and destiny for whites.
All we need is a prophet to convey and deliver this message. White folks need their own Abraham and Moses. Jesus is over. Christianity died when it failed to block 'gay marriage'. It's over.
“Why Tulsa has done poorly?”
A story from Tecumseh, OK
https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/a-premature-and-unnatural-death-in-rural-oklahoma/2016/04/08/7888a74c-f079-11e5-89c3-a647fcce95e0_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202
“One thing I haven’t seen is that NYC is one of the few places you can get around without a car. More walking–>less flab.”
The same applies to Santa Monica and San Francisco.
The region of the world with the highest life expectancy at close to 90 is probably the Greek island of Ikaria. Is it something with the specifics of the local diet? The air? Predictably, researchers have been obsessed with such approaches. The far simpler explanation is that many of the denizens of those islands have a mutation that confers greater life expectancy, but which has been there long enough to spread to other Greek islands or to the European mainland.In post-apocalyptic scifi Utah inevitably becomes a Mormon theocracy and Nevada becomes a state-sized Mad Max themepark.US Latinos have systemically higher LE than American Whites, and by a large margin too. Ultimately I think it comes down to them being a mix of Spaniards (the European country with the highest life expectancy today, even beating out the far wealthier Swiss) and indigenous Indians (who are an offshot of Mongoloids, a race which seems to have systemically higher life expectancies than Whites).Replies: @JayMan, @5371, @AshTon, @Twinkie, @Anonymous
Navajos have a lower LE and they have more indigenous blood.
http://www.nihb.org/docs/07102009/Navajo%20Nation%20Initial%20Response%20on%20NHCR.pdf
The Springfield MSA data cited is from the 2000 Census. Suffice it to say that the area’s demographics have changed a bit in the last 16 years.
OT: Interesting analysis by Dr. Hanson portraying Trump as a white tribal Sharpton or Jesse Jackson
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433921/white-elites-versus-white-working-class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8eg2nBsrUkReplies: @MEH 0910
I canceled this first version of my post. How did it end up showing up?
Twinkie, Good advice that forces you to walk, but in my ‘hood everyone has those invisible fences and you just toss the pooch outside to do his duty. I think I remember my middle age but that was a while ago.
A lot of dogs go batty if just left in the yard, no matter how big the yard is, so such lazy dog owners will incur a negative consequence sooner or later. Some of them, dastardly enough, will then dump the "problem" dogs at kill shelters.
I find dogs to be fantastic running/hiking partners. They make you smile and motivate you. They are also great at sensing danger/predators before you can.
I did not know this. I have a relative that got a type two scare so immediately went on Dr Bernstein’s strict low carb type diet plus excessive. She has lost at least 40lbs.
Well, you can’t help those who are COMPLETELY unmotivated.
A lot of dogs go batty if just left in the yard, no matter how big the yard is, so such lazy dog owners will incur a negative consequence sooner or later. Some of them, dastardly enough, will then dump the “problem” dogs at kill shelters.
I find dogs to be fantastic running/hiking partners. They make you smile and motivate you. They are also great at sensing danger/predators before you can.
avoiding blacks will go far to insure your longevity.
12% commit 57% of all crime in america
I'm not sure what percentage of lower income residents of these cities have substantial inherited wealth, but you do meet them all the time. There are $750,000+ houses owned by elderly people everywhere here, and somebody is certainly inheriting them when they die.
Some poor people in San Francisco also have rent controlled apartments 80% below market rates.Replies: @Jefferson, @Bill
How does proposition 13 interact with inheritance? Does my property tax go up when my parents leave me a house in CA?
More at http://calestateplanning.blogspot.com/2010/03/property-taxes-and-prop-13.html
TL;DR Inheriting children can maintain the exemption but may have to jump through some hoops.Replies: @Bill
But let's look at that 7 year disparity in another way. As noted, it won't be about infant mortality. And it won't be about cancer either, otherwise we'd be getting headlines about "Cancer Threat in Pecos County."
So it's probably about heart failure, and the conditions that lead to heart failure. Part of that is genetic, part of that is lifestyle. In my own community, which is mostly working class, but which has average mortality, what causes death? Well, a half dozen twentysomethings OD every year. Then, starting in their fifties or sixties, people just start checking out. Why?
Well, the first thing is that when people are no longer sexually attractive and involved in that particular dance, and when they are no longer raising children, they don't know what to do with themselves. So, from what I have seen, they start getting fat and drinking. And that leads to all kinds of breakdowns, as some have already itemized.
Of course this doesn't apply to everybody, but it applies in general to people who are only average and don't have any intellectual interests or hobbies to keep them motivated or keep them busy. So I would imagine that the real disparity is between people in, say, Pecos County dropping dead of heart attacks or heart failure in their fifties an sixties at a higher rate than say, some county in Colorado, and that accounts for the difference.
Now then you can say: Well, we really need to do something about Pecos County. Why? These people know what they're doing. But this gets back to the supposed glories of old age. A lot of these people don't know what to do with themselves, that's the sad truth.Replies: @Bill
Gotcha. Actually the combination of drinking and getting fat is a good one. The drinking ameliorates the increased risk of heart disease from the getting fat. They both increase the risk of cancer, though, but, as you say, that kills you later. So, probably, if you are going to get fat, you should at least drink.
It is a racial crisis.
Loss of identity and heritage. That means loss of direction and destiny. It means loss of immunity to anti-white PC and degenerate pop culture.
In the past, even during hard times, white people had identity and moral values of family, community, and church. Now, they are not allowed to have identity, and their only culture is garbage on TV that promotes degeneracy like tattoos, sexual licentiousness, mindless violence, drugs, and etc.
Lena Dunham and Emma Sulkowicz are lucky cuz they were born to privilege. If they were born poor, they’d be meth-heads by now.
American style spirituality is now more harmful than beneficial. Christianity does have historical roots in Europe, but that has been lost. Europeans are now totally secular, and American spirituality is rootless. It is all about Jeeeeesus or ‘jesus is for gay marriage’. So, even though the church might offer uplift to some people, it provides no blood-and-guts core of identity. And their kids grow up in a culture of blandness and grow bored. So, they eventually turn to pop culture and whoriness. Notice that MANY whores and punks are from Christian background.
Also, Christian morality may say NO to vices but fails to encourage YES to creativity, expression, and etc. It is about “you can’t do that” than “you can do this”. Boring Christians are content with sticking with goody-goody morality, but more creative and expressive types eventually grow bored and turn to other stuff, often Liberal in nature since expressive culture is dominated by Libs. It’s people who express who define culture. People who don’t do bad things may be good people, but they don’t shape and command the culture scene.
The only thing that can save white folks in troubled communities is revival of identity, heritage, and community. Spirituality can help, but it needs to be ethno-spirituality like what Jews got. For Jews, spirituality is inseparable from Jewish identity, covenant, Jewish experience, Jewish history, and etc. So, Jewish spirituality makes Jews feel special.
In contrast, American Christianity says a white American Christian should feel closer to some recent Somali convert to Jesus than with this fellow racial brethren who may be neo-pagan or secular. In contrast, even a religious Jew feels closer to a secular Jew by blood than with Christian Zionists who sing hosannas to Israel.
In the long run, American-style Christianity is destructive to the soul.
Jews have a different mindset. Jews feel close to each other by blood and spirit. Jews don’t believe that they must identify first and foremost with Africans, Asians, or others.
Strong identity is necessary for pride, and that is what people need for good health, esp in bad times.
If white folks need spirituality, they need to reject Christianity and come up with new conversation with God. White folks need their own covenant with God. If God can have a special covenant with Jews, why not with another people? Instead of one message for all people — what Christianity and Islam offers —, let there be a different message for each people. Jews believe there is only ONE GOD but this God has a special message for Jews. If Jews see nothing wrong with that, then there should be nothing wrong with the idea that God has a special message and destiny for whites.
All we need is a prophet to convey and deliver this message. White folks need their own Abraham and Moses. Jesus is over. Christianity died when it failed to block ‘gay marriage’. It’s over.
This article discusses Prop 13 and inheritance: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/25/realestate/re-inheritside25
More at http://calestateplanning.blogspot.com/2010/03/property-taxes-and-prop-13.html
TL;DR Inheriting children can maintain the exemption but may have to jump through some hoops.
I don't buy that genetics is always as big a factor as Anatoly and JayMan insist. Just as with birthrates, we've seen pretty wide swings in these numbers in the *same populations* within decades or even years of each other - see post-Soviet Russia for life expectancies, for example. Culture matters, and it can have a huge impact on behavior that affects life expectancy. The Scotch-Irish with supposedly low life expectancies aren't genetically much different from ethnic groups with higher than average life expectancies.Replies: @RolfDan, @Jack D, @Anatoly Karlin
Others have addressed that. Not true.
East European style vodka binge drinking is one of the few genuinely strong cultural factors that can strongly depress life expectancy.
Honduras, a byword for Third Worldism, has an LE of 73.5. Considering its profound poverty and skyhigh homicide rates that it actually not at all bad.
Costa Rica, a civilized middle-income country but still far short of the sort of healthcare you would find in the US or Western Europe, has an LE of almost 80 – almost a year higher than the US.
More at http://calestateplanning.blogspot.com/2010/03/property-taxes-and-prop-13.html
TL;DR Inheriting children can maintain the exemption but may have to jump through some hoops.Replies: @Bill
Thanks! That’s interesting.