Do billionaire mayors make you live longer?

In trying to compose an argument for why Democrats’ best hope for defeating the incompetent septuagenarian autocratic billionaire Republican in the White House is to nominate a highly competent septuagenarian autocratic billionaire (former) Republican of their own, Emily Stewart at Vox — jumping in to extend Vox’s series on the leading candidates in the Democratic presidential primary with the case for late entrant Mike Bloomberg — has some reasonable points, mixed in with one very odd accolade:

Under Bloomberg, New Yorkers’ life expectancy increased by about three years.

Not that this is false, but we must recall that Bloomberg was mayor of New York for 12 years. As pointed out by Oeppen and Vaupel in a Science article that appeared in 2002 (the first year of Bloomberg’s mayoralty), life expectancy at birth in the most economically advanced countries of the world has been increasing at an astonishingly steady 2.5 years per decade since around 1840. If we had then predicted how much increase we should expect over 12 years, we should have said… three years. Indeed, looking at a few comparably wealthy countries chosen more or less at random over the same period we see life expectancy at birth as follows:

Country	2002	2014	Increase
Australia	80.07	82.59	2.52
UK	78.24	81.16	2.92
Japan	81.83	83.73	1.90
Canada	79.57	81.94	2.37
Netherlands	78.41	81.65	3.24

Mike got it done!

To be fair there are two exceptions to this trend: Japan, which had the highest life expectancy in the world in 2002 still had the highest in 2014, but it had gained only two years.

The USA, which had the lowest life expectancy at the start (among large wealthy countries), at 77.03, fell further behind, to 79.06, and has since actually decreased. So I guess you might say that Bloomberg has shown his ability to thwart the destructive trends in the US, and make it, as he made New York, as successful as an average West European country. Which doesn’t sound like the worst campaign platform.