If you want to know how well the population of a certain country is doing, you can just check their life expectancies. This is generally a good tactic, as life expectancy reflects a great number of factors, such as stress level, living and job conditions, level on loneliness, and general well-being.
But in the United States, it would seem like there are discrepancies throughout multiple age and ethnic groups regarding their life expectancies. While some are easily explained by stuff like tobacco use, car crashes, and other such factors, others have left researchers stumped as to why they are taking place.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently finished a census, here are the recent life expectancies of United States citizens. The results are for two years, 2013 and 2014, and further, more detailed results are yet to be published. So far, this is all the information we managed to get our hands on.
The news seems to be mostly positive for minorities this year, as Caucasian individuals, both men and women, seem to have slightly reduced life expectancies. But both Hispanic and African-American men and women alike seem to have slightly increased lifespans compared to previous years.
For the United States overall, the life expectancy hasn’t changed one bit. It remains at 78.8 years, as it has for quite a long while. But this is because general life expectancies don’t seem to change all that much. They do change, from time to time, for particular age groups and ethnic minorities. According to Elizabeth Arias, the researcher behind the study,
Life expectancy numbers for the population have been rather stagnant for some time. It is still not trivial if you put it in the context with the other research.
So, African-American men can look forward to 0.1 years added to their life expectancies, while there was no change for African-American women. Meanwhile, Hispanic women have seen the highest increase this year, their life expectancies growing by as much as 0.2 years. Hispanic men share their number with African-American, with 0.1 more years than before.
News aren’t so good for Caucasian men and women, as white women were reported to be expected to live 0.1 years less than before, while Caucasian men saw no changes whatsoever. This marks the first time in history when the life expectancy gap has shrunken so much between the multiple ethnic factions.
Looking more long-term across history, the life expectancy of white women is assumed to have dropped because of increasing cases of tobacco use. Meanwhile middle aged white men seem to have the highest increase in their death rates, mostly attributed to drug use, gun injuries, and car crashes.
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