Why the racial gap in life expectancy is declining in the United States

Abstract

BACKGROUND Blacks have lower life expectancy than whites in the United States. That disparity could be due to racial differences in the causes of death, with blacks being more likely to die of causes that affect the young, or it could be due to differences in the average ages of blacks and whites who die of the same cause. Prior studies fail to distinguish these two possibilities. OBJECTIVE In this study we determine how much of the 2000–10 reduction in the racial gap in life expectancy resulted from narrowing differences in the cause-specific mean age at death for blacks and whites, as opposed to changing cause-specific probabilities for blacks and whites. METHOD We introduce a method for separating the difference-in-probabilities and difference-inage components of group disparities in life expectancy. RESULTS Based on the new method, we find that 60% of the decline in the racial gap in life expectancy from 2000 to 2010 was attributable to reduction in the age component, largely because of declining differences in the age at which blacks and whites die of chronic diseases. CONCLUSION Our findings shed light on the sources of the declining racial gap in life expectancy in the United States, and help to identify where advances need to be made to achieve the goal of eliminating racial disparities in life expectancy.

Decomposing changes in life expectancy: Compression versus shifting mortality

“…Some methods focus on discrete differences between two life expectancies (Pollard 1982;Arriaga 1984;Pressat 1985;Andreev, Shkolnikov, and Begun 2002;Firebaugh et al 2014) while others consider continuous changes (Vaupel 1986;Keyfitz 1977;Vaupel and Canudas-Romo 2003;Beltrán-Sánchez, Preston, and Canudas-Romo 2008;Horiuchi, Wilmoth, and Pletcher 2008). We follow the latter approach of a continuous decomposition of changes in life expectancy by vari-ability and shifting effects using a recent expression of the Gompertz mortality model.…”

Understanding the contribution of suicide to life expectancy in South Korea

“…By separating the incidence and age components we determine whether change in life expectancy is occurring because people are dying of different causes, or because they are dying of the same causes but at different ages (Acciai, Noah, and Firebaugh 2015;Firebaugh et al 2014). Change in life expectancy is due to change in death rates, and age-incidence decomposition reveals the locus of the death rate changes that are driving the change in life expectancy.…”

“…The term 'incidence component' refers to the change in life expectancy attributable to such shifts in the causes of death. For change in life expectancy from time 1 to time 2, the incidence component for a specific cause c is ( 2 − 1 ), where 2 − 1 is change in the lifetime risk of dying of cause c (suicide), that is, change in the proportion of life table deaths due to cause c (Firebaugh et al 2014). The weight differs for two-factor versus three-factor decomposition (described later).…”

“…The original twofactor method (Firebaugh et al 2014) implicitly assigns one-half of this joint effect to the incidence component and one-half to the age component.…”

“…To understand the contributions of suicide to life expectancy in Korea, this study examines how much the rise in suicide rate has reduced life expectancy in Korea and why, using the age-incidence decomposition method to separate the age component from the incidence component (Firebaugh et al 2014). Specifically, this study addresses the following questions.…”