Comments

1
Wow, white, middle and upper middle class people live longer. Who would have thunk it. Finish the gentrification of the CD and Rainier Valley and watch even more white progressives pat themselves in the back.
2
Cascadia Scorecard shows BC as having a higher life expectancy than Washington state, so I believe it all comes down to differing methodologies and the pundit/blogger's penchant for myopically cherry-picking data.
3
I wonder how much of this has to do with older people living in Seattle as opposed to people living older in Seattle. Replace a frat house with a retirement home and statistically everyone on that block's average age shoots up. I'm hoping that they've accounted for this and we are in fact living longer and better than we were twenty years ago.
Anomalies aside, it just ain't healthy to eat fast food and drive everywhere. There was another study out last week that showed that suburbanites are six pounds heavier than urbanites.
4

Goldy, access to near immediate and excellent quality health care might be a contributing cause. Folks in the eastern part of the state don't have the same availability.

Japanese longevity has come into question recently due to poor govenment and community oversight of its older population. It has come to light that families of long deceased elders in Japan have been collecting their elder relation's monthly old age pensions while the elder is mummifying in a spare room or has simply disappeared. A bit of a scandal in Japan, and it has called into question Japanese longevity. Seattlites may now hold that dubious prize.
5
@2, this also shows BC having a higher life expectancy than Washington...
6
I'm not normally a fan of the unregistered but @1 is 100% correct. Affluent white people live longer, and Seattle is increasingly an affluent white enclave.
7
I would expect as some American cities become more and more expensive to live in, more of those city's residents are likely to have healthier lifestyles. That doesn't immediately explain, however, why Seattle might differ than other pricey American cities. Is Seattle unique in that it's displaced a larger percentage of its population with lower mortality expectations?

I'm also surprised by how high the life expectancy is. Nearly 83? What are those projections based on? Is it an extrapolation of a historically upward curve?
8
@3,

Life expectancy isn't the same thing as average age.
9
@8, Right. I expect to live forever.
10
@9,

You and my 13-year-old daughter.

(Actually, she's convinced that kids her age will live to be at least 120.)
11
@2 and @5 are correct.

And a lot of British Columbians aren't white, you racist Fnarf.

Actually, a lot of Seattleites aren't either.
12
@10 be careful what you wish for.

I can just see all the hard-working centarians complaining about how they wish they could retire, but they still have to support the retired Baby Boomers.
13
@7, while Seattle's gentrification is pretty strong, it's nothing compared to San Francisco's -- that city has lost something like 2/3 of its black population in the past decade or two (I'm too lazy to look it up). It's really quite shocking. I wonder if it's because their rate of Chinese immigration is so much higher than ours -- Asians have very high life expectancy in the US but recent Chinese immigrants do not. Also, SF has a lot more Mexican immigration than Seattle, though if you count the surrounding metro area the gap is narrowing (the Seattle metro had very few Latinos just a short while ago).
14
@13 - You're right about SF's black population disappearing, who arguably suffer from the shortest life expectancy, statistically. But SF's a difficult analog, given the small size of the city with an otherwise extremely diverse population (I think whites are still in the 50% range, but "white" also encompasses a huge array of recent immigrants —mostly Russian and Eastern European—who, like the Chinese immigrants that also came to the Richmond and Sunset districts 30 years ago, come from both poverty and affluence.)

I'm assuming "life expectancy" refers strictly to "if baby A is born in place B in year C, they are expected to live X number of years? All I can add is that we're lucky the windy blows all year round to carry our smog out into the central valley, or we'd have the air-quality of Los Angeles.

Ok I'm rambling now... snack machine time.
15
"Life expectancy isn't the same thing as average age."
Sure, but the question still remains about how you calculate that life expectancy number. It's not pulled out of thin air, so it has to be generated from available data, like average age at death for example. Statisticians, or at least good ones, put a lot of effort into sifting through the data to come up with valid conclusions while lazy ones churn out simple numbers that make catchy headlines. I'm wondering which ones we have here.
16
#15 it's more of an estimate than anything. Presumably this is average life expectancy. There's nothing really to "account for". If you want to know the life expectancy of your particular age group it's a different number.

In any case, overall life expectancy would be inflated by more young people, not more old people, as life expectancy of a typical newborn is increasing over time, and old people have already logged a long life of factors contributing to a low life expectancy.
17
Actually, it's on the label of the y axis: this is life expectancy at birth.
18
I thought that life expectancy was based on the average age of people dying now, but maybe not?

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