Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2014 15:35 -0400
America is growing older.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the conversion of America’s age pyramid into a rectangle from 1960 to 2050, as was shown in a recent post highlighting America’s two ‘slow-motion’ social dramas. As the Pew Institute summarized “we’ll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5. This is the result of longer life spans and lower birthrates. It’s uncharted territory, not just for us, but for all of humanity. And while it’s certainly good news over the long haul for the sustainability of the earth’s resources, it will create political and economic stress in the shorter term, as smaller cohorts of working age adults will be hard-pressed to finance the retirements of larger cohorts of older ones.”
And as society comes to grips with the realization that the average age of America will hit new record highs with every passing day for the indefinite future, a new, and far less pleasant topic is sure to gain prominence. Namely: how Americans Die.
This should be intuitive: since older people die sooner than the young, even despite the generally declining mortality by age cohort, the sheer record number of aged Americans will soon drown out the incremental improvements in life expectancy.
But it is not only age that is a key issue: one surprising finding (in addition to a curious tangent of a brief spike in AIDS-related deaths in the late 80s and early 90s for the 25-44 year old cohort), is that over the past decade, motor vehicle accidents has lost its top spot as the primary cause of violent deaths across the population, handing over the title to both drug-induced deaths and suicides.
Incidentally, in 2010, the number of suicide deaths was nearly four times greater than the number of Americas murdered by firearm. Perhaps it is time to ban suicides.
All these and many other curious observations surrounding this fascinating topic are revealed in the following interactive visual data compendium by Bloomberg’s Matthew Klein.
So without further ado, here is a detailed look into How Americans Die.
First, it should be obvious that courtesy of numerous, life-extending advances over the past several decades, the morality rate has tumbled. Yet in recent years, it has been mostly males who have benefited. Overall progress stopped in the mid-1990s.
However the lack of improvement can be attributed to a simple factor: the aging of Americans, and specifially those aged 55 and over have risen as a total portion of the population from a little over a fifth of total in the year 2000 to a quarter currently.
Another obvious observation: old people die sooner than the young
Instead of breaking down the population into genders, looking at age cohorts over time shows a plunge in mortality across all age groups, with the biggest beneficiaries being Americans 25 and under.
However, something curious appears in the 25-44 age group sometime in the late 1980s…
That something was AIDS…
The AIDS epidemic was so bad for about a decade, the disease became the single largest killer of Americans in their prime, surpassing cancer, heart disease, and all other causes of death.
Of all races, however, the AIDS epidemic targeted mostly black men between 25 and 44.
Another curious observation: there has been no progress in mortality for the 45-54 year olds since the late 1990s.
This quandary is further compounded by the reduced mortality of cancer and heart disease – the biggest traditional killers of this age group – over the past several decades.
So what is the offset? Simple – a surge in deaths from two new killers – suicide and drug deaths.
As noted earlier, while until the mid-1990s, gun deaths outnumbered drug deaths, since then the number of gun murders has actually declined, while drug deaths have exploded. As have suicides. Actually perhaps it is time to ba suicides and drugs. Oh wait, somehow the pharma lobby wouldn’t be too happy with that.
As for cars, no need to ban those: motor-related deathes have plunged to a record low, even with seemingy everyone texting and driving.
Safer roads, however, have been more than offset by an explosion in suicides, with representatives of the 25-44 age group most likely to take their lives.
Still, despite all of the noted curious patern shifts, the reality remains that most Americans are living longer and dying of natural causes.
If there is any bad news here, it is that as Americans get older they increasingly succumb to such debilitating, age-related diseases as dementia and Alzheimer’s. Indeed, while there has been substantial progress in heart disease-related deaths, the total number of deaths in the 75 and older category has remained flat, precisely due to the increasing prevalence of such age-degenrative conditions.
Which means one thing is certain: the amount of spending on Alzheimer’s and other age-related diseases is set to soar.
Source: Bloomberg
I’m going to die jerking off while watching Salma’s titties bounce.
I’m going to die while admiring myself in front of the mirror and my head explodes.
I’m never going to die. Jesus is coming back very soon and I’m going straight to heaven. If you fuckers would just repent you could join me.
I’m gonna die while taking out a gaggle of niggers and a flock of spics.
The truth is that I’m a 350 pound fat fuck with clogged arteries and I’ll probably die from a heart attack.
I’ll probably die laughing at Stucky’s jokes while eating a burrito. Stucky, he’s the best!!
We know EXACTLY how Stucky is going to die.
Fuck death.
Jim Quinn, 50 something (pictured below) met his Maker today while traveling his beloved 30 Blocks Of Squalor. R.I.P.
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You have outdid yourself this time, Stuck. Do you ever sleep?
Funny Stuck, especially Admin. One of his attackers has a white hand, so the reference to the 30 block is dubious, as is the convertible.
What’s it say about our society that suicide is the number one cause of violent death. And drugs? Don’t tell SSS. Our empty consumerist society is meaningless (except for the people selling crap), so take drugs, if that doesn’t end your meaningless existence, then you can always kill yourself.
Or maybe working and making something of your life really does add value to both society and your life. And since you can live comfortably off the government and taxpayer without having to lift a finger, and half our population has chosen this meaningless, empty existence, no wonder the numbers. Or smoke yourself to death, or eat yourself to death. For GOD’s sake, don’t maintain your health, exercise, eat less than you want, meditate and enrich your soul. That is SO un-American.
I am going to die choking on something that tastes like chicken.
This article could use a few more graphs.
Those people who think JC is coming back to shuttle them off to heaven to live in opulence as if they were some evangelical preacher should understand the real mission of JC: how to turn the earth into Heaven. No need to go any where.
I never tire of hearing about how the US life expectancy is longer than it has ever been, but most of that we now know is a result of reduced infant mortality and improved trauma care. If we were to take those two factors out of the historical record I would make a wild guess that life expectancy has likely dropped, especially for the 70+ set due to horrific diet coupled with stress. We’re repeatedly told about medical advances in treatment and early diagnoses- which is great- but you never hear about the increase in incidence (thyroid cancer, for example, has grown by close to 200% in the past 30 years)
You know what I’d love to see? A quality of life expectancy statistic. Is it better to spend your final years as a senile, bedridden octogenarian being handled by minimum wage immigrant “care givers” isolated from your loved ones eating institutional fare and pumped full of pharmaceuticals 24/7? Is that what we have to look forward to just to squeeze out an extra five years?
I have a lot of friends who are in there 80’s and 90’s who still farm. Most Americans don’t know many people in that age cohort outside of their own family, if they’re lucky. These guys may be grizzled and old, but they are still active and productive. They have their wits about them, they appear on the surface to be contented and inn all of their cases they have the support and fellowship of multiple generations of younger people around them to keep them invested in life.
One of these guys was trapped under his tractor in the snow a couple of years ago until his granddaughter noticed he wasn’t coming in for supper. He spent a couple of days in the hospital and it’s become a favorite story of his to tell (his daughter had come by his place to make lunch for him and saw him waving his hat to her from under the tractor and thought he was just saying hello and left him there until the granddaughter came by later) but that guy is still at it. He’s 92. He has all the basics of what makes for a quality life- family to love and care about him, a purpose in life that gets him out of bed in the morning, a diet of fresh, local and seasonal fare that he produces himself, a community that is proud of his accomplishments and can understand his stories because they speak the same language and share the same history and regardless of his age appropriate aches and pains he still has skin in the game.
Whenever I am told of how great things are these days, whether because of economics or social change I make sure to fact check against reality. A bigger income may sound like a good deal, but when you account for inflation and it turns out that a 100K circa 2014 doesn’t buy what a 20K income circa 1960 bought, then you have to decide if things really have improved. I’d rather die pinned under a tractor on the frozen ground while my grandchildren were making my dinner in the house than tucked in a warm nursing home bed attended to by a Jamaican orderly, even if it meant 10 extra years.
Americans are absolutely fixated on averages, probably because that is what so many aspire to. The price for the latest Chinese trinket is cheaper than it has ever been, the life expectancy has increased to it’s highest level ever, there are 600 channels on the TV. But if its all crap- the final years, the imported consumer goods, the programs we watch- what’s the advantage?
One of my favorite things to do with my younger children is to watch old black and white programs like the Twilight Zone. We recently watched “It’s a Good Life” where a little boy with mental powers makes the whole world disappear except for his own small town and its inhabitants. I know that Rod Serling had a very different message in mind when it first aired (even Hitler was a child) but in the intervening years its come to look like a very different message about politically correct thought- that if you do not believe that every imaginable horror is good, if you do not proclaim degeneracy and evil as morality and goodness, you will be made non-existent by the ultimate authority.
I told them how important it was for them to be true to their own moral code out of love, not the imposed code driven by fear. Its the same with :How Americans Die”. Most of us fear dying, but so few are courageous enough to be fearless of living.
If someone wants to make a fortune in the coming years I suggest that you build a nursing home based on that so-called fictional world of the 1950’s that “never existed”. Staff it with nurses in starched white uniforms and old time peaked nurse caps, play re-runs of old B&W shows, build it in the center of a farm where they can look out the windows as cows graze and feed them the products of that farm. Because as the article points out there’s a lot of baby boomers that will be filling those beds for years to come who will pay dearly to spend their last years in a world that “never existed” except in their own memories.
We live and then we die. It will all work out in the end. AWD- that was a high yellow mulato killing Quin.