NYers living longer than other Americans - who knew?
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Why New Yorkers Last Longer
This city, once known as a capital of vice and self-destruction, is
now a capital of longevity. What happened?
By Clive Thompson
Last winter, the New York City Department of Health released figures
that told a surprising story: New Yorkers are living longer than
ever, and longer than most people in the country. A New Yorker born
in 2004 can now expect to live 78.6 years, nine months longer than
the average American will. What’s more, our life expectancy is
increasing at a rate faster than that of most of the rest of the
country. Since 1990, the average American has added only about two
and a half years to his life, while we in New York have added 6.2
years to ours. In the year 2004 alone, our life expectancy shot up by
five months—a stunning leap, because American life spans normally
increase by only a month or two each year. When these figures came
out, urban-health experts were impressed and slightly dazed. It turns
out the conventional wisdom is wrong: The city, it seems, won’t kill
you. Quite the opposite. Not only are we the safest big city in
America, but we are, by this measure at least, the healthiest.
The “average life expectancy” of a city is a statistically curious
number. It’s not really a prediction about how long you’re going to
live. It’s an average of how long everyone here lives—and thus it
forms a good barometer of the overall health of the city. In
particular, a city’s average life span is sensitive to the rates at
which people die too young. Since the average New York life
expectancy is now 78.6 years, anytime someone dies younger than that,
it drags the city’s overall average down slightly.
The math works like this. Imagine that one man dies of AIDS at age
25. Since he was statistically supposed to live to 78.6 years, he’s
died about 50 years too early, so he shaves 50 years off the city’s
overall pool of life. If one Wall Street guy collapses of a heart
attack at age 65, he shaves only ten years off. You’d have to have
five Wall Streeters die at that age to equal the impact of one AIDS
victim. By the same logic, one infant’s dying during childbirth—77.8
years too early—is equal to ten people’s succumbing to lung cancer at
age 70. It is a very weird form of horse trading. The more you’re
able to prevent young people—folks in their twenties and thirties—
from dying, the more rapidly you boost a city’s overall life expectancy.
And this is precisely what the city has done, through a combination
of smart public policy and sheer luck. All the boons of the nineties—
the aggressive policing, the dramatic drop in crime, the renaissance
of the city’s parks and street life, the freakish infusion of boom-
time wealth—played a part. Take the miraculous evaporation of the
homicide rate. In 1990, a stunning 2,272 New Yorkers were murdered;
in 2005, that number dropped to 579. Since a majority of those being
killed were younger men, the reduced murder rate alone added tens of
thousands of years to New York’s life-expectancy pool. Another big
drop was in HIV mortality rates. In 1994, deaths from AIDS peaked at
over 7,100, but the arrival of better drugs and health care began to
whittle that number by 80 percent—so in 2005, only 1,419 died of
AIDS. Again, the majority of the lives saved here were those of
younger men, resulting in a disproportionately big upward leap in our
city’s life span. In 1989, the infant-mortality rate was 13.3 babies
per 1,000, and by 2004, it had been halved, to 6.1, both because
medical treatment improved and because alcohol and drug addictions
eased. To top it off, drug-related deaths, another arena with
disproportionately younger victims, tapered off, too.
Homicide, AIDS, and drugs are characteristically New York ways to die
young, of course, so it’s no surprise that when we sharply decreased
the fatalities they caused, we caught up with the rest of the
country. But here’s the thing: It’s not just that we’ve conquered
these urban blights. Cancer and cardiac arrest are down, too. The
number of people in the city dying from heart disease has dropped by
a third in the last twenty years, and cancer rates have slid by
nearly a fifth. And again in these cases, New York is getting
healthier faster than the rest of the U.S.
In essence, there is a health gap emerging between our massive
metropolis and the rest of the country—some X factor that’s improving
our health in subtle, everyday ways. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope
calculation shows that once you take out those uniquely New York ways
to die—AIDS, homicide, etc.—we’ve still added at least 200,000 extra
years onto the city’s life-expectancy tables since 1980, making
crucial advances in the same health areas the rest of the country
struggles with. Like many New Yorkers, I’d moved here with some
trepidation—always figuring that the stress, pollution, and 60-hour
workweeks would knock about five years off my life. I was wrong—
precisely wrong. But where, exactly, is our excess life coming from?
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