Comment by jhbadger
2 years ago
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
That last sentence is a massive step beyond common knowledge, if it's true... and I don't think it is, what can doctors do?
> The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women. Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/#:~:tex....
But from the same paper:
> One such theory is that health and longevity are related to differences in medical care. The present analysis provides limited support for this theory. Life expectancy for low income individuals was not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care provided, such as the fraction insured and measures of preventive care. The lack of a change in the mortality rates of individuals in the lowest income quartile (Figure 1) when they become eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of 65 years further supports the conclusion that a lack of access to care is not the primary reason that low-income individuals have shorter life expectancies.
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That being true, I do doubt that a single obituary writer falls in the poorest 1% of individuals. If I were to take a guess, I think the average salary of a journalist who writes obituaries may fall in the top 25% of income. Does the gap in life expectancy continue to be that large if we compare the top 1% and the top 25%?
Unfortunate as that is it's not at all surprising. Comparing the median with the top 1% would be more interesting. The gap there is still quite significant:
(for 40 year old men, unadjusted by race): 100th inc. prct : ~ 88 years: 75th inc. prct : ~ 84 50th inc. prct : ~ 82.5 25th inc. prct : ~ 79 5th inc. prct : ~ 76 1st inc. prct : ~ 72.5 (had to infer the values visually from charts because I wasn't to find a table including all the groups...)
However (I assume the data is very limited though) there is almost no difference in life expectancy (for men or women) when your household income is above >$200k (back in 2014, so probably quite a bit higher now). So I don't think there are any efficient treatments available only for the ultra-rich, just being rich or upper-middle class should be enough to get access the best(ish) treatment there is.
For the bottom income quartile when comparing local areas: the % of people with not insurance, medicare spending per enrolled person and 30-day hospital mortality rate seem to have the highest correlation with life expectancy. Which all should be trivial to fix for a relatively extremely-rich country like the US...
Looking at the appendices one interesting point I noticed (assuming I understood it correctly) is that people at the 50th percentile are more likely to reach 77 years than those in the top 75th or 100th prcts. But after that point income seems to matter a whole lot more.
Another seemingly very weird correlation (page 43): higher inequality in local area seems to be correlated with lower life expectancy for all income quartiles except the bottom one (so basically poorer people tend to liver longer in high inequality areas even though the difference in years is not very big).
That's a very interesting study. I'm surprised the relationship is so linear through all the way through the income percentiles, aside from the very bottom few. I would have expected a relative plateau in the middle.
I really doubt a writer for the NYT is going to be in the bottom 1% of income or wealth.
Having bad health is a hell of a way to waste the time you could have wasted on making money instead.
The other comment provided some support for the claim, but I want to add that I would consider this fairly common knowledge. It regularly comes up in discussions about socialized medicine, for example.
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
The guy died at a age of 100 dude...
In this case, Kaufman died at 71 of an incurable cancer though.
Incurable by the time it was caught and even then "incurable" can sometimes end up being curable with a ridiculous amount of resources.
They might have more money but there's no higher class.
Perhaps worth noting that he lived 13 years past the time the obituary was penned.
13 years past how long a contributor to the obituary lived. The contributor may have started work on the obituary even earlier and probably did, as Kissinger was 87 and it probably would have made sense to pre-write the obituary sooner.
I wouldn't be surprised if a first draft of this one was written 50 years ago.
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It really doesn't matter. Those writers are immortal. The only thing that would change such an obituary, is a regime change.
Common? Give us another example
See here for some recent obits written by Ronald Bergen, who died in 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ronaldbergan
The reasons have much more to do with much better diets, getting better sleep, not working stressful and physically demanding and dangerous jobs, etc.
I’m interested by the notion that the Secretary of State has a less stressful job than a guy writing obits. I mean, even if you’re only a cabinet officer for a couple years, that’s gotta take more off your clock than a lifetime of typing news articles with a deadline of “eventually the subject of the article will die.”
Being fabulously wealthy helps a lot.
Turns out that being able to afford a better life leads to a longer life.
Genetics play a huge part as well. From birth, we're given a death clock, which goes downward as stressors hit us, then further as we relive that stress.
In other words, everyone would probably live to ~110 in a perfect, stressor-free world.