Do you know what kills educationally challenged people? Think about it. This is not as hard as it might first appear.
Give up?
You’re gonna hate yourself when I tell you the answer.
* * *
I found the answer to that age-old question, OK, OK, just my question: What kills people who have relatively little formal education? I also discovered what kills rich people and what kills, or at least used to kill, the best educated among us. I’m going to throw those answers in for free.
In the early 1990’s I was the database editor at The News and Observer, acquiring, loading, and analyzing mostly government databases. One day I got to messing around with North Carolina’s death database, trying to find out what kills people who aren’t all that smart.
That database told me each dead person’s sex, race, and years of education, date of birth and, of course, date of death. I lumped all the males together, by race, and by year of birth, and had the computer calculate the average years of education for white men, and black men, by year of birth. Same for females.
Then I compared each dead person’s years of education to his/her group average and put the difference between those two numbers in a separate field. For each person it was plus this or minus that, depending on how much education they had compared to people of the same sex and race, born the same year they were born.
[I eliminated everyone under age 24 because they may have died while they were still in school, before they had completed their education.]
Now I could compute the average education level for each cause of death. And I could find out what killed people who did not have as much schooling as other folks.
Have you guessed correctly? People in North Carolina who got run over in the street had a lower level of education than people who died from any other cause of death.
I told you you’d hate yourself.
* * *
Common sense, as well as various studies, tells us there is a correlation between how much education a person has and how much money he or she makes. That allowed me, by grouping dead people with the best educations compared to their peers, to figure out what kills rich people.
The answer? Cancer.
Why is that?
Tell you what I think: highly educated people don’t have dangerous jobs. They don’t roof houses or cut timber or climb power poles — they don’t get killed on the job. They don’t get drunk and get in fights at bars at 2 in morning. They don’t smoke but they do wear seat belts and go to the gym. And they can afford to go to the doctor when they feel bad.
But sooner or later every one of us has to die and if something else doesn’t get you, cancer will.
* * *
Now this may surprise you: What single cause of death claimed the best educated group of people compared to their peers — same race, same sex, same year of birth?
The answer: AIDS.
In the early years, before AIDS began killing drug addicts who shared contaminated needles, it was mainly a plague afflicting homosexuals. And homosexuals, as a group, are well educated.
Postscript: This post is not “old news.” It’s new news. I was not reporting when I did that data analysis and, in any event, this is not the kind of story I worked. For some reason I wasn’t able to get other N&O reporters interested and it never appeared in the paper. Don’t ask me why because I think it’s a good one.
Coming Friday: Why Her And Not Us?