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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-out-your-dead dept.

The American lifespan declined slightly in 2015, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report based primarily on 2015 death certificates:

Life expectancy in the United States has declined for the first time in more than two decades. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics showed a drop for men from 76.5 years in 2014 to 76.3 in 2015, and from 81.3 to 81.2 for women. The preliminary figures show rises in several causes of death, especially heart disease, dementia and accidental infant deaths.

Life expectancy last fell during the peak of the HIV/Aids crisis in 1993. It has improved slightly but steadily in most of the years since World War Two, rising from a little more than 68 years in 1950. It also fell in 1980, after a severe outbreak of flu. Overall life expectancy for men and women is now 78.8 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2014.

[...] The death rate for cancer has gone down 1.7%, which is significant as cancer is the second-biggest cause of death, causing almost as many fatalities as heart disease. But it seems that fast-developing research into cancer treatments, as well as campaigns on public education and early detection, are having an impact.

But do they account for the effect of fake deaths?

Mortality in the United States, 2015 (PDF)

An anonymous coward sent in an article from The Atlantic covering the same news.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:54AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:54AM (#439897) Journal

    America should look to the Federalist papers for inspiration, including it's warnings on populism by Hamilton.

    I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but what does that have to do with TFA and life expectancy declines?

    In fact, if life expectancy continues to decline, that will eventually lower population, which might be the only way to get back to the representational scaling intended by the Founders. :)

    (For those who aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, the Founders were skeptical of populism, but they ALSO intended to ensure the aggregated voices of individuals were heard DIRECTLY by their representatives. That just isn't possible with the modern scale of Congress, given our population.

    The average US representative in 1789 represented about 30,000 people. The Founders intended to keep that ratio below 50,000 [wikipedia.org]. Now, a US Congress member represents about 700,000 people. And, frankly, most of the Founders really only imagined the representatives in 1789 would be representing white, male landowners, which would be a much smaller subset, close to an order of magnitude lower (fewer in Southern states, more in Northern states, due to slavery effects in apportionment). Anyhow, a US Congressman in 1789 was basically supposed to express the wishes of probably somewhere around 5000 voters -- not small enough that they could necessary know everyone, but certainly feasible that they could have personal contact with significant subset of them.

    To get a similar representation of voter views in 2016, we'd likely need a House of Representatives with ~50,000 representatives... obviously unwieldy. So, if you really want to go back to the world of the Founders, you either need to build another layer of representing the representatives or something... or you'd need a massive die-off in the population.)

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