Meaningless Statistics Lead to Meaningless and Misleading Conclusions

The latest meaningless statistic floating about is the 'sudden' drop in the U.S.A's ranking in life expectancy.

It's a very misleading number, for a number of reasons, but this is being used by advocates of more nannyism to promote more nannyism.

First of all, 77.9 ain't bad for life expectancy, but even that number is just being pulled out of thin air. The very top is 83.5 for Andorra, which isn't particularly different in quantity. If someone dies before their 84th birthday, do you say they died too soon? Do you think someone who dies before blowing out 78 candles was stricken too early? Didn't think so. Anything past 75 is a full life. Some people pack more living in their years than others, but basically, any healthy years past the age of 75 is pure gravy (and death before 75 is too soon).

But the number is still a lie. One of the bigger components dragging down the USA's number compared to other developed (and under-developed nations) is the way we count infant mortality. We count 'live births' differently than the rest of the world, and babies that would never be delivered elsewhere, get delivered here. That alone could account for the difference between the USA and France, UK, or Germany. We have the highest infant mortality rate because we count every infant. Europe doesn't, a lot of cases that they consider 'stillbirths' are full term or close to full term babies. Their lower rate of premies isn't necessarily cause of better neo-natal care, but because their view of 'viability' is completely different, and they are much quicker to abort fetuses for medical reasons (even in the 2nd and 3rd trimester).

The European view on this is more 'pragmatic', which makes comparing health statistics impossible when there's such a huge cultural difference in this area of medicine (the wiki explains the difference succinctly) pure bunk. I bet if we were to count all women who enter the 3rd trimester and then compared survivability one year out, suddenly the European mortality rate would look worse if not comparable to the USA's. But they don't keep that statistic, so there's no way to do the comparison.

I haven't seen a single article mentioning the new US ranking that brings up the huge differences in reporting on infant mortality, though they do mention how our 'high' infant mortality rate factors into our lower life expectancy at birth.

Also, how accurate is life expectancy at birth? It's not outside the realm of possibility that some children born in 2004 may end up living in some form or another well beyond 'natural' life spans. Read enough sci-fi, and you can start to believe that within 75 years downloading of consciousness into a neural net, or transferring consciousness from an older body to a younger body is an achievable goal. Look where technology was 75 years ago, and given the exponential rate at which certain technologies advance, the possibility that real life extension (turning life spans into centuries rather than decades), might be possible. There are a few non-nut doctors out their who are working on 'curing' aging.

And if aging does get 'cured' I bet there will be plenty of Americans lined up to get cured. So the real average life expectancy for an American kid born in 2004 could end up being well beyond 77.9, if the aging cure ends up not being ridiculously expensive, then a significant portion (at least significant enough to greatly alter the average) of Americans born in 2004 might still be around in 2400.

The mind boggles, but I'd rather think about that than use some dumb easily manipulated statistic that relies on governments to report on themselves to tell us that we're 'slipping' compared to the rest of the world.

I've already heard some folks use this as another cudgel with which to beat us into submission on the notion that nationalized and socialized medicine is superior.

Yet I don't see anyone looking at how many of those countries ahead of us in life expectancy also 'lead' us in percentage of the population who smokes. Maybe we just need to smoke more. Seems to work for Japan.

And one more thing, another thing needlessly brought up in this article is the disparity between 'black' and 'white' life expectancies. You want to 'cure' that disparity, then legalize drugs. Much of the disparity is due to the violence and incarceration targeting black men associated with the drug trade. Make the drugs legal, and the street crime, and disparity in death rate will evaporate (though some extra OD deaths may occur, I would guess that this increase would be less significant than the much greater drop in deaths due to illicit drug trade related gun play).

So these are my conclusions, if you want the USA to climb up this chart again, legalize drugs, game our infant mortality statistics the same way Europe does, and don't over-regulate biomedical research. Do those things, and we'll be number one (or at least number eleven) again in no time.