Expected Deaths by Race, Age, and Sex

The table belows gives the expected number of deaths before their next birthday, per 1000 persons alive on a given birthday. Meditation on this table could lead rich rewards in observations and questions about the differences between males and females (from the earliest age) and between blacks and whites. Just one obvious observation: DISCRIMINATION KILLS, sometimes openly and brutally but much more often quietly.

The table can be used to estimate multi-year expectations, if one begins by assuming that the 1990 expectations also apply to 1991 and subsequent years; this assumption is usually false, because new causes of death may arise and medical practice may be reducing death rates. Nevertheless, in the absence of other data, using 1990 data to make multi-year estimates will produce fairly good results.

To give a concrete example, let us estimate the probability that a black male, alive on his 29th birthday, will be alive on his 32nd birthday. The problem involves a chain of conditional probabilities, multiplied together: P(alive at 32 | alive at 31) * P(alive at 31 | alive at 30) * P(alive at 30 | alive at 29). From the table, we estimate this probability as (1-.00424)*(1-.00401)*(1-1.00378), using the fact that P(alive at x+1 | alive at x)=1-P(dead before x+1 | alive at x). The final estimate is .098802 (there's about a 1% chance that he'll die before age 32, given that he is living at age 29).

The same problem, worked for a white female, yields .99816 (there's about .2%---2 chances out of a thousand---that a white female will die before age 32, given that she is alive at age 29. Thus, between ages 29 and 32, death for a black male in the U.S. is about 5 times more likely than for a white female. And there hides a deep story, indeed!

The sources for this table is the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, 116th edition, published by the Department of Commerce (page 89).