Fairfax County, Virginia, has the highest white male life expectancy in the US

Fairfax County, Virginia, has the highest white male life expectancy in the US (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation via the WP).  Not only that, Fairfax County has a higher white male life expectancy than any country has for male life expectancy.  Fairfax County's while male life expecancy is 80.9 years, while Iceland, the world leader in male life expectancy, is 80.2 years.  BTW, Japan isn't in the very top group here (see below).  Not clear to me how much measurement error there is in these local life expectancy estimates. 

At least I'm living in the right US country, even by global standards.   Here are the top US counties for white male and white female life expectancy.  And do scroll down for more after this table...

 

The headline for this data is, via Kevin Drum, that life expectancy has fallen in the last decade in many parts of the US.  And the declines are in 'bad areas'.  The largest increases are in wealthy high educated metro areas like NYC suburbas, the DC suburbs or the Bay Area suburbs with already the highest life expecancy in the US.  This fits with the observation that Increases in Adult Lifespan in the US are Very Unequally Distributed by Income from a few days ago.

In lots of place in the United States, women are living shorter lives than they used to:

In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.

"There are just lots of places where things are getting worse," said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which conducted the research. "We're not keeping up."

....A key finding of the data is that "inequality appears to be growing in the U.S.," said Eileen Crimmins, a gerontologist at USC who also co-chaired the 2011 National Academies panel on life expectancies. "We are different than other countries."

The map is below.

Why is this, just from a variance decomposition into age specific death rates? Is this about young or old people mortality?

Also interesting: Japan's position as the country with the highest life expecancy in the world is due to the life expectancy of Japanese women -- Japanese male life expecancy is only # 10 in the world, shorter than countries like Switzerland, Canada, Sweden or even Israel or Australia!  Though the differences are small.   

 

Comments

[Jody]

Common sense bets that this is type-2 Diabetes and heart disease and cancer related. All poverty/lifestyle stuff.

BTW, I agree that weight loss was far more painless for me than the common wisdom presented. But I know that my lifestyle/access to all things health related is so far outside the average that I don't think that tells me anything. Except that income disparities have large scale, large scope social effects.

[Jody]

Or, to put it another way, we got lucky that my dad didn't develop a fatal pneumonia or blood clot while immobile after obesity-related spinal deterioration led to paralysis. He could easily have died at 60, instead of the hoped-for mid-seventies. He's been unemployed for six years, he and my step-mother have some lifestyle/health challenges I can't discuss publicly, and they are the classic example of people whose income seems to correlate with lifestyle and health outcomes that lead to shorter lives.

Of course they vote Republican. I would mark them as totally irrational on this issue but from a purely household-economics POV, we vote irrationally for the Democrats.