Young People and Mortality

From Meep at Stump we get the following: Mortality Nuggets: "Young People", Actuarial Club Meeting, and Disparate Results Pre-Pandemic

As the title indicates, there are several topics covered by Meep, but I am interested in the shot she took at something from the Wall Street Journal. A publication that should be, but apparently is not, used to dealing with statistics. Numbers anyway. (I guess math is hard when you're a "professional journalist.")

It seems that the WSJ can't be bothered to do more than look at everyone under 24 as "young people." Which, of course makes no sense. Or do you think that the reasons 2-year-olds die, have anything in common with why 18-year-olds die?

Which really points out the problem of this analysis. It shouldn’t be lumping all “young Americans” together, because this is absurd. For mortality trends, there is a reason I split it up 1-4 (preschool or little kids), 5-12 (school age or just plain old “kids”), and 13-17 (teenagers). I don’t include 18-19 with these groups — 18-24 can be its own group of young adults.

The graphs are a bit disturbing, and I was going to include one, but you should click thru for that. If you look at the graph for cause of death, for 13 to 17 year olds, suicide, homicide, drug-overdoses, motor-vehicle accidents, and even cancer have all been increasing steeply since 2018 or 2019. Some appear to have been growing since 2013 or so anyway. Suicide for that age range has been generally increasing since 2007 or so.

Suicide death rates had been steadily increasing 2007-2016 and had a peak 2017-2018. Rates came down in 2019, and somewhat increased in 2020-2021, but were still below the 2017-2018 peak.

Now you can screen out COVID-19 and cancer as being out of anyone's control, and even if you don't consider drug overdoses in the age of fentanyl, the increase in suicide and homicide is a bit disturbing. Even some things, like motor vehicle accidents, which had shown great improvement over the years, got substantially worse. Suicide and homicide increasing the way that they are seems to indicate something fundamentally wrong with the culture.