JAMES TARANTO: Rich Man, Poor Woman? The truth about poverty stats: It’s complicated.

The answer to this mystery can be found in the Social Security Actuarial Life Table, which charts, by sex and at every age from 0 to 119, the probability of dying in the next year, the average remaining life expectancy, and the number (out of 100,000) who are still alive at that age. The table gives us three pertinent facts about Americans under 18:

• Boys have a higher infant-mortality rate than girls. Out of 100,000 live-born boys, 699 die before age 1. For girls the figure is 573. That means the infant-mortality rate for boys is approximately 20% higher than for girls.

• Out of 100,000 boys, 1,140 die before age 18. For girls the figure is 867. (These figures include infant deaths.) That means the total mortality rate for minors is 24% higher among boys than among girls.

• Boys are likelier to die than girls at every age except 10 and 11. Those are the ages at which persons of either sex are least likely to die, and the sex differences at those ages are minuscule.

Mortality among infants, children and teens is correlated with poverty for a variety of reasons, including greater exposure to abuse, neglect and crime and poorer quality of nutrition and health care. Boys are at greater risk than girls because they tend to be less robust physically and, as they get older, likelier to get involved in crime and other dangerous behavior. So if there are slightly more impoverished girls than boys, it is likely because poor girls have a better chance of surviving to adulthood than their brothers do.

A similar explanation applies to the elderly. . . . Old age is a shipwreck, de Gaulle observed. Like the Titanic, it is one that women are likelier to survive–and that is why old women have a higher poverty rate than old men.

Sorry, doesn’t fit the preferred victimization-narrative.