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Comment by portmanteur | Hacker News Reader

These sorts of charts are meaningless without being broken down by race.

I did a quick search for "US Mortality Rate by Race" and I found CDC documents showing that African Americans have roughly 35% higher age-adjusted mortality than non-Hispanic Whites [0], and have on average 7 year shorter life expectancy at birth [1].

When people show maps where the American South has seemingly worse outcomes than the rest of the country, it's important to remember that the demographic makeup is totally different.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db456.pdf page 2 [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr71/nvsr71-01.pdf page 2

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The article explains that the result holds when controlling for race (and income, and education).

Yes, there are racial disparities in life expectancy.

Still, people of all races in the US are behind their European counterparts in life expectancy.

And British people at the same income decile have much longer life expectancies than Americans of the same income decile, despite the fact that Americans at every income decile (except perhaps maybe the very poorest) are richer in absolute terms than Brits.

> These sorts of charts are meaningless without being broken down by race.

I see the exact opposite: the data you showed is meaningless without being broken down by income.

The "life expectancy vs income" chart works similarly in almost all countries, including single-ethnicity countries. So it's clearly something.

But the race one you showed is not income-adjusted. It's well known Black people in the US on average is poorer than, say, White people. It's totally possible (with full data, it's easy to do statistical analysis) their low life expectancy is largely due to poverty.

Combine a map of where African Americans live and where American Natives now live and you pretty much recreate the map in OP. Not exactly though, because you'll still be missing Appalachia. So it really is just a poverty map.

From the linked thread[1]:

> One misconception I also want to address: the dreadful US performance does not disappear if you “adjust for race”.

> This is way way overstated.

I wonder where the is? Different data sources?

[1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799890605932544

Why does race need to be brought into it?

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