Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/10/82-yrs-vs-64-yrs.html
…
5 Likes
Late stage capitalism/Working as intended
13 Likes
You could fix this in a generation:
– Single-Payer Healthcare; Costs less, works better. We know this from other countries, and are fools for not adopting it. (If you want to ask where the money will come from, I’ll say again: We have 6,600 Nuclear Weapons that don’t do shit; why not cut that down to 600 and give everyone medical, dental, psych care, and vision?)
– Stop subsidizing Corn Syrup with my tax dollars; if Iowa farmers can’t make a profit on their crops without my taxes paying for it, they’re bad at farming and should get out of the business.
– Stop allowing advertising of bad food to anyone under 18 – no bring colors, no cartoon mascots, no TV ads – and stop advertising medical-illness maintenance drugs to anyone over 18.
Our current for-profit healthcare system only helps those who profit from it; time to destroy it.
8 Likes
You forgot one more important policy: eating the rich. They’re evidently nutritious.
4 Likes
If I am reading this properly everyone’s life expectancy is dropping
1 Like
I’ve been dying to know this information.
4 Likes
What troubles me most is that the folks in the country are fed a steady diet of “socialism is bad always no matter what” even while capitalist executive vultures are circling over their proverbial economic corpses.
It’s like they are given no other options but to embrace fascism and give in to their easily stoked hatred.
9 Likes
Well sure: the longer you live, the more time you have to earn money. /s
2 Likes
The chart shows the survival rate of a cohort over time, so each data point is the percentage of folks in the cohort who survived that year. Naturally, the proportion of people dying in the cohort will increase as time goes on, because all people are more likely to die as they get older. The chart thus shows how much more likely poor people are to die than rich people as they age.
ETA: when I wrote “each data point is the percentage of folks in the cohort who survived that year.”, I was assuming one definition of “survival rate”, but now I believe they used a different definition. So each data point is the percentage of the folks in the cohort who survived until that year.
6 Likes
Those are pretty cool, but those policies do not reverse the income distribution inequality gap that is fundamental to disparities in population health inequity.
To reverse this trend we need policies that result in compressed income distributions, and yes, wealth redistribution.
11 Likes
I am so confused by this chart…It almost seems that it is showing who that was alive in 1992 and between age 51-61 is still alive today. Is that what it is showing?
If so, what don’t they all start at 100%. If not, what exactly is it showing?
Take the top line (the top 20% richest people), it went from ~97% to ~75%. So, only 75% of people age 51-61 in the top 20% richest people in this country will survive? survive until when? i am so confused.
1 Like
ah, you are correct I think, I thought it was a traveling cohort but it is a single group in 1992
2 Likes
Is there any way we can get that chart with ages/average lifespan per demographic for right now?
As in, if you are in the bottom 20% of wealth holders, you’ll probably only live until 64 or so on. Or an expectation, that at today’s rates, if you’re in the bottom 20%, and you’re 40 years old, you’ll probably only have 24 more years.
I can imagine that the data is hard to parse or interpolate that into something meaningful, but showing that 78% of the richest 20% of the population from 1992, is still living vs. 48% of the bottom 20% from 1992 is still living, doesn’t really make for a sensible discussion.
It’d even be neato to see if this has changed overtime. As in, no matter your income, most people in 1992 had the same life expectancy, and in 2019, depending on your income, you might likely have 15 years shorter lifespan.
Yeah, it’s not the best chart.
Yes, that is what it is showing, but they don’t all start at 100% because the X-axis doesn’t start at 1992 (which they really failed at labeling). The X-axis starts at 1996, I believe.
It’s not saying that 75% will survive, it’s saying that 75% did survive by 2014. The chart isn’t making any predictions, it’s just depicting what happened to the people who were tracked.
4 Likes
survive until when
Survive until the date shown on the x-axis.
Yeah - amazingly, by 1996 (or possibly '97, that’s what my scale comes up with) 2.5% of the richest quintile had died but 8% of the poorest quintile had!
2 Likes
That joke always kills me.
2 Likes
I think the point to show, was that, the longer everyone lives, by and large, they have a somewhat steadily increasing chance of becoming dead, especially when you extrapolate that data onwards into the future.
Single-payer healthcare could be one policy that helps to chip away at the inequality gap since the cost of being uninsured/underinsured can have profound impact on a working-class family’s finances.
Decoupling health insurance from employment would also enable more people to leave otherwise unappealing jobs for new opportunities, meaning employers would have to find other incentives to retain workers.
8 Likes
Nobody wants to take a risk on being an entrepreneur or starting a new business if they can’t even pay for their child’s insulin. And new businesses are the real wealth generation machines in America.
Being a self made rich person means risk. And we have built a system with fatal stakes for failure in starting a business with all you got.
13 Likes
