https://scitechdaily.com/century-long-study-reveals-startling-differences-in-life-expectancy-across-u-s-states/
Fascinating. I'm not that surprised by state-level differences given difference in obesity or literacy rates from state to state, but I am surprised that in 1900 there was very little difference among states.
And actually, if you compare the longest-lived and shortest-lived populations by state with obesity by state, you'll see that 4 out of 5 of the longest lived are in the lowest category for obesity and 3 out of 4 of the states are in the highest category for obesity. I suspect obesity rates were super low in 1900.
All that makes me think that the food environment is a big driver and for whatever reason it is worse some places than others.
Make that food-water-air environment and I think that covers 80%+ of it. Access to health care (including ability to pay for) probably accounts for 10-15%.
I agree that the state is a pretty big pool to measure these things, but there does seem to be a measurable difference. Seems policies matter to quality of life. I'd also be interested in seeing life expectancy measured against things like exposure to violence, incarceration, drug addiction and family cohesion.
>> exposure to violence
That would be another interesting, probably sad, map to overlay that with. The thing about violence is that it mostly kills the young and a single young death draws life expectancy down by a lot.
>> air
query: "How many lives would be lost if London still had pollution levels similar to the Victorian era?"
Models:
- Claude Sonnet 3.5
- Gemini 2.0 Flash
- Web search (beta set to 5 sites, 500 words per site)
Summary: the Great Smog of 1952 had pollution levels similar to Victorian-era air quality. In five days, 4,000 people died during the event with 10,000 - 12,000 dying from consequences of exposure to the pollution in the days and months that followed.
Adjusting up for population differences, the result would be 10s of thousands of deaths annually, maybe more over the long term. This would be offset by modern medical care (and probably air filters in tightly sealed modern buildings though none of the LLMs think of that).
1min.ai has a "web search" beta but it's not clear how it uses that in the answers at all (i.e. is it feeding that info to the LLMs? It doesn't seem so). Maybe I should have tried 2000 words per site.
BTW - they all agree, but could all be wrong. A relative sent me something she got from a friend who decided not to read an article but had some LLM summarize it for her, got outraged and started sending the summary to all her friends - 30 seconds of fact checking was enough to see that it was wrong.
But 1min.ai says it was drawing on these articles and it seems to have mostly gotten to have accurately summarized them
https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-in-victorian-era-britain-its-effects-on-health-now-revealed-87208
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
Wikipedia seems to think that the pollution levels in the Great Smog were the worst ever though, so not typical of, say, 1900.
Striking note in the article in The Conversation:
"The effect of atmospheric pollution can be measured by looking at men who were born in the 1890s whose heights were recorded when they enlisted in the British army during World War I. Their average height was five feet six inches (168cm), but 10% were shorter than five feet three (160cm)."
> environment
This is an interesting read too:
https://theconversation.com/why-did-humans-grow-four-inches-in-100-years-it-wasnt-just-diet-25919
Short version - avg height tends to increase with income, but there are exceptions, where industrialization tends to result in shorter people. The hypothesis is that crowded urban conditions led to more childhood infection, but you could also couple it with the pollution info above.