The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England
twitter.com
twitter.com
[1] https://nitter.moomoo.me/pic/orig/media%2FFsjYUjhWcAEatMo.jp...
[2] "From 2020 to 2021, age-adjusted death rates increased for 8 of the 10 leading causes of death and decreased for 2. The rate increased 3.3% for heart disease (from 168.2 in 2020 to 173.8 in 2021), 1.7% for cancer (144.1 to 146.6), 22.5% for COVID-19 (85.0 to 104.1), 12.3% for unintentional injuries (57.6 to 64.7), 5.9% for stroke (38.8 to 41.1), 2.4% for diabetes (24.8 to 25.4), 9.0% for chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (13.3 to 14.5), and 7.1% for kidney disease (12.7 to 13.6)." https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db456.htm
I still think drugs, guns, and accidents are worth specifically highlighting even if they aren't the single biggest driver of this disparity in life expectancy. I'd wager that most people are aware of America's obesity epidemic, but they might not realize the extent to which these three (big) factors make the US unlike it's peers. I certainly didn't.
This is for overall life expectancy, not 5 to 40 death rates though. I would expect cardio-metabolic disease is a significant driver of "early" deaths (say before 65) in those over 40 in the US compared to other developed countries.
In the USA and Canada, the probability of death from these diseases is roughly 1 in 3.
As I recall, other developed countries are kind of catching up. Malignant neoplasms and cardiovascular disease are becoming the typical causes of death in the majority of cases in most countries, generally followed by accidental injuries and suicide.
The good news is that if you don’t kill yourself, you exercise, and you eat well, you can likely avoid or significantly delay these events. Accidental injury though, that’s hard to control for.
I think you are confused about this because you also brought up child mortality. Yes, child mortality is also much higher in the US than other developed countries. But we knew that. The article is focusing on less discussed yet very impactful factors which disproportionally impact young people in the US.
You are trying to make the conversation about something it is not, and have changed their point to my point (from primary to important but not primary) to then say I am being unreasonable because I don't understand their point, which is in fact mine. There is no reason I should accept to be shut into your box. Read the twitter thread, and this comment thread again, and it is clear you are the one trying to force the conversation to be about one very specific thing while refusing that it is legitimate to place it into a larger context - the overall causes of lower US life expectancy.
The only reason I care is I don't want a bunch of people running around with the false idea in their head that we just need to deal with the important social issues of our younger generations, and we have solved the bulk of the problem. They are certainly important, even critical issues, but that is not true.
Deaths by billion vehicle miles in UK - 5.2. In US - 12.5. (both have tens of thousands of KSI, but the US has over twice as many per cap. In fact, way, more KSI from car accidents than even gun related homicide in the US. I hadn't realized that!)
Deaths by gun related homicide in UK - 200. In US - 20000. (Both numbers pale in comparison to motor vehicle deaths, but there are a lot more in the US. Probably to be expected as there is stringent firearm control in the UK.)
Deaths by drug overdose and poisoning in UK - ~5000. In US - um, yeah, well over 120000 if you count the poisonings too as the UK does. (I'll just say, I think we found one of our major culprits in this one.)
I'm thinking overdoses is a major contributor. It's the only way to get to millions in less than 10 years. Car accidents, maybe, but honestly it's not that much compared to the number of young people who die every year. Ditto, with gun related homicide, which is even less than car accidents.
I know we may not want to talk about it, but I also noticed major numbers in suicides among young people. (More than vehicle accidents and gun related homicides combined in 2021.) Not sure if that's where the parent comment was going though? So I left that out. It could be a contributor though? The numbers are there, which is what you need to impact averages.
My takeaway? Suicides and drug overdoses. Not to be taken lightly.
That's from 2019, numbers for the last 3 years are a little harder get but like attempts went up but deaths went down at least in most places but in a couple places deaths shot up a lot?
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/042722-COVID-adolesc...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...
Yikes.
Not exactly how I remember it.. but yeah. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyu-bobst-library-suicides-al...
Looking at the date of the article, they were almost contemporary.
US: 14.5 UK: 6.9 Germany: 8.3
The problem IS NOT tall structures. The problem is something about US society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
This is one of those metrics that really makes US federalism apparent and shows the drastic difference in outcomes from the two major parties. By reviewing the per state metrics[1], you can see that states that take a much lighter hand to drug criminalization and that offer state sponsored relief (California, for instance) have a much lower death rate to ones that take a heavy hand (southern states, New Mexico, etc).
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
You say Southern States have a higher death rate, yet Mississippi (typically considered archetypical of the deep south) a lower per-capita drug overdose rate.
Texas, which is a state dominated by the party that does not rule California has an overdose rate about 75% that of California.
There's a lot more going on than your analysis would suggest.
UK driving test is difficult, and I suspect drunk driving is much lower because distances are lesser and public transport is better.
> suicides
Much easier when you have a gun around
Has that changed? Is the UK license standard as high as it once was?
That's because the media only reports on unusual deaths.
For example, sometimes I'll see the emergency crews pulling a body out of Lake Washington. It never makes the news. Drowning deaths are too common.
I read somewhere that drownings were the 2nd leading cause of death for children. Cars were #1.
People drown mainly because they underestimate the risk of it.
I know parents who had their toddler drown. The grief and devastation of that never stops, decade after decade. They had camped near a river bank, and the kid wandered off into the water.
Basically the #1 causes of unintentional death in age order are drowning (<5), cars (5-20) then drugs (20+).
Guns get an outsized portion of air time on most media. Especially crimes committed by legal weapons against white people. If all gun crimes were covered equally you would hears a lot more about gang violence and illegal weapons.
> Deaths by gun related homicide in UK - 200. In US - 20000. (Both numbers pale in comparison to motor vehicle deaths, but there are a lot more in the US. Probably to be expected as there is stringent firearm control in the UK.)
I'd be curious to see the difference between gun homicides and homicides. The UK has a huge knife crime problem.
> I'm thinking overdoses is a major contributor. It's the only way to get to millions in less than 10 years. Car accidents, maybe, but honestly it's not that much compared to the number of young people who die every year. Ditto, with gun related homicide, which is even less than car accidents.
Overdoses and drug related deaths. Drug addiction will shorten a person's lifespan by decades.
* Cars tend to be bigger i.e. more dangerous in the US
* Drink driving seems to be more acceptable in the USA.
* The driving test in the UK is much tougher than even the toughest us state
* Most of the US don't have mandatory annual vehicle inspections to check they're safe and roadworthy
I'm always kind of surprised how terrified Americans visiting the UK are, when they see the kind of speeds people drive at here.
If you're coming here on holiday from the US and you're planning your route using Google Maps, double the time estimate. You won't like the speeds it expects you to drive at.
To accommodate big cars.
I think you could make a reasonable argument that much of these actually are healthcare problems. But either way, investment in looking after people is the solution, what that looks like is probably more controversial.
Certainly that Americans die young, but that could be because American healthcare does worse for people between 5 and 40.
Eg. You'd prefer to be in a car crash in Canada, because it's more likely that the healthcare will take better care of you
Wow. Actually impressed with the analysis backing this up. If you read the entire thread, he actually covers nearly every correlating factor I could think of.
And it's pretty clearly drugs, guns, suicide, and cars. (The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong).
The one that is crazy to me is the uptick in driving fatalities. Cars are an order of magnitude safer than they used to be and we were trending towards 0. An entire generation has to be that much more reckless than before to make that kind of a dent.
All the guns also cause -a bunch of— some small kids to kill their siblings every year.
While controversial because car companies in the US intentionally chose to market large SUVs to the public, there is some evidence that smaller vehicles are safer and that auto manufacturers have doubled down on unsafe vehicles. Why this is the case, isn’t exactly known, but one of the theories is that bad drivers will get behind bigger cars and take more risks.
I’ve driven both large SUVs and smaller subcompacts, and I can talk at length on the pros and cons. However, as a driver, I can tell you that smaller cars are often bullied by larger cars, and this gives weight to the idea that people driving larger vehicles take larger risks, resulting in greater danger to the driver and to other cars and pedestrians.
There’s also the mistaken perception by older generations that smaller cars are inherently more dangerous; this was once true, and everyone can point to disastrously unsafe compact cars in the 1970s and 1980s. But due to modern technology and safety enhancements, this probably hasn’t been true for the last two decades or more. This older, erroneous belief continues to underlie why people choose larger vehicles today.
It is appears that the driver of the large SUV or pickup believes they have right of way over smaller cars, pedestrians and cyclists.
A "get out of my way" attitude.
I love small cars, not to mention cycling and walking.
It concerns me that the shift of cars parked at the parking lot has dramatically changed over the past 20 years.
Walking from the car to the shop is like carpark gauntlet, you need to be increasingly ready to dodge giant vehicles reversing with disregard to their surroundings.
Most accidents only involve a single car.
There is less control in larger vehicles.
Everyone thinks they are a better driver than they are and the only way they'll end up in an accident is if someone else hits them.
Add all this up and many want to drive larger cars.
Smaller cars bear more of the risk in a multi-car accident from the more dangerous larger cars. The smaller cars themselves are safer.
It's like saying t-shirts are less safe than guns because they won't stop bullets.
I hear this a lot and wonder how true it is because I personally think i am a horrible driver and can't wait until actually safe fully self driving cars take away my need to drive. on the other had a drive a small car and want a smaller one despite sharing the roads with behemoth raised 4x4 pickups that seem to be inexplicably popular.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. Poorly written fuel efficiency regulations incentivized automakers to do this.
One thing I find genuinely surprising is that the Renault Zoes we have as pool cars at work have got far bigger blind spots and far worse visibility than my 25-year-old Range Rover.
And, in turn, although that Range Rover is described as an SUV (it's not especially sporty, it's a top-heavy three tonne army truck with nicer seats), it's the same length and width as most "normal" family saloons. It's got a much smaller footprint on the road than some large 5-seaters like a Tesla Model S.
My ‘60s Triumph 2000 had amazing visibility. If I’d rolled I’d have died for sure, but I’d have seen the thing that killed me.
You can argue that this is irrational based on handling or fuel economy or whatever. But for better or worse buyers prefer size and comfort.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/ford-focus-2022-5-d...
I laugh every time I walk to my car because I don't want to cry.
Fine if that's what you happen to have lying around, but why would you choose something like that? It's totally impractical.
No they don't, unless you're going to quibble about what a bunch is. Numbers that seem to show lots of deaths to "kids" pretty much always include age ranges old enough to include gang members.
So what if they were? It's pretty damn sad for a person young enough to be considered a child to die from gun violence regardless of who they were! A sad societal failure on top of our failure to set them up with life circumstances that made them unlikely to fall in with a gang.
But that’s of course not the main thing about guns and kids in the US like everyone knows.
School shootings are far down the list. They get a lot of attention but don't account for a large proportion of deaths.
Of course, that any of these deaths occur is tragic, which is why the most sensible solution is repeal of the Second Amendment and implementation of a nationwide, federal license requirement to purchase or own a firearm. 120-day grace period. License each gun, turn them in, or go to jail.
Let the gangs resort to cutting each other like Japanese gangs.
I don't know why every car doesn't have around-the-car view cameras right now. New teslas have all the cameras, but don't show the view!
That goes double for trucks of all types - even though they are professionally driven.
and likewise, people are getting so big they can't drive their cars...
in Texas, police officers in some municipalities have requested that their vehicles be modified to elevate the steering wheel...they literally cannot jam their stomachs between the seat and the wheel, and if they push the seat back far enough they cannot reach the pedals
Here's a bit of an anecdote, but I bet my family isn't alone in this type of story... my cousin died from cardiac arrest at age 45. Keeping the story here brief - he was a high-income business owner who got into a tough spot in his marriage and business, found himself without health insurance when he had a medical episode. Knew something was wrong and would likely bankrupt him - and we think that's why he didn't follow up with his doctor and was dead two weeks later. Congenital issue, could have been easily resolved - but without health insurance it was probably a death sentence either physically or financially.
Now, this was just as the ACA was coming into play - but I'd argue it's moot. The ACA was well-intentioned, but has not actually improved the insurance or care situation for the majority of Americans. I need a surgery at present that won't be covered by my insurance to any meaningful degree, and being in rural America my care options are limited. So I'll live with regular pain because the system doesn't work. And I hear stories like this in my social circles weekly.
I hear you about the health care situation though. Health insurance is definitely not the same thing as health care.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_legacy_fil...
My buddy separated his shoulder snowboarding when he was 22, but had no health insurance because he was working at the ski resort for something like $6/hr (US Ski Resorts are legally allowed to pay below minimum wage... go figure).
So he never went to the Doctor, because he couldn't afford it. He's 41 now, and that shoulder impacts almost every day of his life.
Oh, I'm not American, and actually I was there as a 22 year old Australian and was horrified. The idea that people in a Developed country didn't have access to a doctor was shocking - I'd never seen that before, and simply didn't understand. I thought everyone could just go to the doctor when they needed to.
Almost everyone with insurance has a maximum out of pocket limit now. It's possible to have a grandfathered employer health plan, but they'd have to have been running it since 2010 without substantial changes since then, including in benefits or cost increases. There are very few employer health insurance plans that would have met that criteria, and even fewer who tried to.
They also have to directly inform you that you're on a grandfathered plan, so it should not be a mystery to those who somehow are.
"maximum out of pocket" does not mean what any normal person would interpret it to mean. More than one year I have had to pay way more than the "maximum out of pocket".
The insurance company gets to decide unilaterally how much of what you pay out of pocket is credited toward their tally of what you supposedly paid out of pocket. In several years I've paid a lot more out of pocket than what the insurance statement credits me for having paid.
How it works is that blue shield (with employers I've typically always had blue shield in California) sends a statement saying your doctor visit cost $XXXX, blue shield will pay $YYY and this will credit $ZZZ towards your annual out of pocket total.
But $XXXX - $YYY > $ZZZ, so what I actually had to pay to the doctor was more than blue shield credits me for having paid. So at the end of the year what I've actually had to pay has been well above the so-called "out of pocket maximum".
It doesn't happen most years (to me), but has happened on multiple years.
Hell, about an hour ago a cop tailgated me while I was going 15 over the limit, wove through traffic to cut me off, run a red light, then damn near ran another driver off the road. No lights, no emergency, just an asshole. This is the behavior you have to expect from all drivers now.
At least two or three times a week I have a close call that would wreck my car or seriously hurt someone, and I pretty much only drive up and down the one road between my house and the office, it's a 5 mile drive.
There's something very deeply wrong in American society, and I don't see things improving any time soon.
Having said that, the data backs you up. 7% increase in per capita road fatalities in 2020. Then a 10.5% increase on top of that in 2021!
Why signal your intentions to your opponent like a chump? They'll just use that information against you to block you from changing lanes, or to duck into a parking lot row ahead of you in a crowded parking lot and steal that empty spot. /s
Any hypothesis as to what it is? I think it is a lack of community. We've become transactional and virtual/online communities are not sufficient.
In terms of driving I think it got a lot worse during the pandemic because with the lack of daily commuter traffic allowed people to drive faster and hence more recklessly.
By the time the "regular" people feel it (ala, the rich people), the problem may be irreversible.
> By the time the "regular" people feel it (ala, the rich people), the problem may be irreversible.
I think they definitely feel it. You can see it here on HN. You can see it everyone resigning, in the vogue of despairing and not caring.
If we didn't have a gigantic military that spends over a trillion dollars a year on the purchase of armaments, our armaments manufacturers would have less money to make our news media insane.
I think defensive driving is becoming more important as well and I worry far more about driving at night, as people get more erratic, than I used to.
That's easy enough. People who were socially minded stayed home; people with an individualistic attitude ignored recommendations. You hear similar stories from people working in customer service - the average quality of the person they had to deal with plummeted.
What's a bit peculiar is that, according to you, road culture has not recovered.
Cars in the US have gotten much larger and heavier in recent years.
A Ford F150 might be safe to drive, but it’s not safer for pedestrians and other road users than the smaller cars we used to have.
Keep in mind that while we had cell phones for a while, it’s only within the past 10 years that the whole “distraction economy” became a thing, so while people may have used phones to communicate back in the day, nowadays they might be using the phones even more just to attend to those distractions.
And it probably has the same accuracy as the spellcheck on the T9, unless you meant to talk about the ducking ponyman in your text.
[1] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45875073-9823577-...
[2] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45876985-9823577-...
A difference in mass of around 15x, I believe.
This isn’t true for the US, cars are actually more dangerous due to the prevalence of SUVs that skirt safety regulations by being sold as light trucks.
Smartphones.
A sudden secondary effect - legal pot is leading to many more stoned drivers where I live (NJ).
Jevons Paradox perhaps; you make the cars safer, so people feel more empowered to drive recklessly.
I saw the same thing in Europe, southern Italy was very chaotic roads compared to Northern Italy.
Every other nation in Europe manages to keep the car between the white lines, Italians can't even manage it when parking.
Or maybe they are driving more dangerous vehicles (e.g. bigger and heavier)?
Because with advent of SUVs you can't actually see most of the things that you normally would see through your car window. Because SUVs are bigger people believe they are safer, they are deathtraps on wheels for everyone involved. Also because they are bigger drivers believe they can bully everyone else on the street or just don't pay any attention to what is going outside.
1. You could easily argue that frequenting a pub shortens your lifespan, but I just loved "pub culture" when I visited colleagues in England. It's a great antidote to loneliness.
2. You can argue all you want that the NHS has loads of problems, but even some rich people in the US, when faced with serious medical issues, their first thought is "will this bankrupt me" or "will I get hit with a giant unexpected medical bill"? Our healthcare system in the US is simply indefensible.
3. Cities and towns in England are just much more walkable, "congenial" in general, e.g. row houses instead of separate, fenced off suburban houses with yards in the US.
A) legal liability
B) marketing of treatments and medications to the public means patients demand them. Patients shop doctors until they find one that gives them what they want.
C) money incentive.
For example, US opioid epidemic stems from legal opioid prescriptions.
Here are the counterfactuals: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/... drugs, traffic, diet, guns.
I could see city planning being a contributor. But the effect is so extreme the place to start is deliberate policy. It would be hard for that to be the case without high-level standardisation on terrible ideas. The US does link healthcare and employment so that might be the root cause; it is a stupid link.
Today, millions of Americans are deluded into thinking that their "employer-provided" insurance is free. Because the true cost is buried in pay-stub line items that nobody looks at (if it's even required to be there; I don't know), it's huge.
This "system" serves corporations, not people. Big companies get a workforce replete with people chained to dead-end jobs by their healthcare; insurance companies get fat, fat payouts; and small businesses and individuals get screwed.
My best friend runs a small business in the USA that actually makes things in a factory and employs people. Why the hell should be be an insurance broker as well? And if you're self-employed... Obamacare is the only thing saving your ass. And if your income isn't in the sweet spot, it's not really affordable either.
So we are really screwed hard. You'll never get Republicans to defy their corporate owners and lobbyists to reform this shitshow, nor will you get their base to comprehend that they're being ripped off and demand such reform.
Employer-funded insurance should be taxed out of existence and replaced by employer-provided CHILD CARE. Now that's something that keeps people out of the workforce and actually makes sense for an employer to provide.
Yeah, I don't think they feel that way.
What is your basis for that? Does it vary by state - I'm pretty sure states that invest less in health get much worse outcomes. And how can people without health insurance somehow get sufficient healthcare?
I've been in communities where many people lack health insurance (and note the bubble HN is in, where those people are seldom here to speak for themselves - for most people, it's like I visited a foreign country). I remember one person, after a car accident with many broken bones, spending 13 hours in an ER, in extreme pain, waiting to be seen. One older parent described to me removing maggots they found on their diabetic adult child's legs.
> I could see city planning being a contributor
Based on what? A dislike of city planning?
Obviously the US does not provide healthcare to its citizens, unlike every other wealthy country. You don't need much creative, insightful thinking to find the problem here. Citizens want it, the Democrats want it, almost every other major political party in the developed world supports it afaik. Like climate change, gun control and safety, and more, only the GOP opposes it; that's the problem.
There are many single-party States that nonetheless have broken healthcare systems. You can’t legitimately blame the intransigence of any political party in those States, they control their own outcomes. I live in a single-party State (Democrat) and the systemic incompetence and corruption in healthcare is evident without any Republicans in sight.
Americans have very little contact with Federal law. The legal environment they live in is set by the States, by design. If you don’t like the laws where you live, or the competency with which they are executed, that is on the State.
> China's life expectancy is now higher than that of the US [1].
Here’s a slightly deeper dive into this story [2].
[1] https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/china-us-life-expectancy-birth-2021...
Historically, it was a pleasant seaside resort town. The rise of cheap flights combined with a decades long neglect of northern England has meant that all of these Victorian era holiday destinations have fallen to ruin, with Blackpool falling the farthest.
Left alone, it would just have been a shabby, run-down place - but to make matters worse, the cheap guest houses and B&Bs became the ideal place for drug addicts to live, or homeless people to be shoved out of the way. Blackpool hangs off the bottom of the rest of the UK districts in terms of life expectancy because of the normal health downsides of poverty, combined with the extra problems associated with excessive levels of drug and alcohol abuse.
—HN
That was a meta-comment about what 99/100 threads about “why is Europe poor” or “why do schoolchildren have to practice mass shooting drills” are about (i.e. classic Europe/America culture war fodder); people talking about their precious FAANG jobs and how they couldn’t mine data for 200K annually in their native Moldova. Well, sure, people are dying of preventable disease but, y’know why are they making such bad choices? People should just apply themselves (like me) and learn to code.
Then of course people disagree with them. But the locus of the conversation is still about the upward mobility opportunities of tech nerds.
Then out of those thousands of comments there are “other side of the tracks” observations (I mean stats) about how those who didn’t apply themselves are doing.
Could have fooled me since we’re apparently just talking statistics, not relaying personal experiences.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...
It would be interesting to see a proper study of baldness by country and age over time as I'd imagine much can be put to genetics, but diet and sleep rates etc might increase the speed of hairloss, resulting in decreasing age of bald men, rather then an increasing rate.
The core regions resemble the developed world, with similar levels of education, wealth, and political perspectives.
The peripheral regions are much worse off. Entire states, such as West Virginia, are peripheral. Think low wealth, low life expectancies, and entirely different politics from the rest of the developed world.
If you average values from both regions, you won’t really be characterizing either of them. The value will be too low for everyone in the core, and it will be too high for everyone in the periphery.
So when comparing the US to other countries, you’ll get a much more accurate picture by providing separate summary statistics for the core and periphery.
[1] https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/21/british-people-fat-no-denying...
But something like Frosties, a popular cereal in the UK, is 37%: https://www.kelloggs.co.uk/en_GB/products/frosties.html
So although breakfast in general might be an example, that particular cereal doesn't seem too different.
The American one has a similar label, except it's not coloured.
My parents bought Frosties as a very rare treat. My American cousins seemed to always have sugary cereals.
I know the non-fat healthy Americans on HN and reddit don't like this being brought up and would rather blame "the system". But even the Danish healthcare system would collapse if we were as fat as you.
By contrast in the European countries I've lived in, a fat person is just someone who looks pregnant when they're not. Pot belly, chubby arms, but doesn't really have problems walking.
Both parties are responsible for dismantling the infrastructure to care for the humans who live here in favor of profit seeking. Republicans perhaps only slightly more so, but this is the obvious "finding out" result of the "fuck around" period we've had since the 70s.
> the average American now has the same healthy life expectancy (years lived in good health) as someone in Blackpool, the town with England’s lowest life expectancy (by far)
Some of these charts don't make sense.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
But, as an outsider (AU) looking in, they're not at all surprising.
Getting most of my information about the USA from what might be called (there) as left-leaning (but elsewhere as centrist) -- or witty aphorisms like 'Russia's about to find out why we don't have health care' (wrt weapons shipment to Ukraine), or the despairingly persistently applicable '"No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens' satirical headline -- this all seemed to be a generally well-acknowledged consequence of the society there?
To informed USA citizens, are these figures genuinely unexpected?
Or alternatively, is it the figures for the rest of the world that are the unexpected revelation here?
i don’t go to the doctor
i don’t work out
i eat poorly (the american diet is poison but addictive/hard to avoid)
i don’t go outside (too busy inside working/addicted to a dollar)
then add mass shootings
then add drunk driving/texting and driving
cancer
etc
Last week, I traveled to L.A. for the first time in ~ 15 years and I was very shocked to see how much everything there has degraded.
This is of course anecdotal evidence and very likely biased by my faulty memory, but still ...
The combo of the number of homeless people under West LA freeway overpasses, the quasi-perpetual gridlock even on surface roads, the dereliction of infrastructures (roads, buildings, even private single family houses in middle-class neighborhoods), the number of boarded shops in downtown Santa-Monica, and worst of all, I felt that the local where noticeably "grimmer" than I remembered them ... all of it was fairly shocking.
Really not the sweet SoCal I remembered from the nineties and aughties, and old friends I met with who stuck around confirmed that my feeling was not wrong - in spite of the boiled-frog effect of living there throughout, they felt exactly the same.
https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/error-pages/expired-link?c...
This may seem like a grabbag of policies, but it's because (as it is mentioned in the Twitter thread), there are a grabbag of failures: lack of healthcare, forced dependency on cars, and deaths of despair, which are very closely tied to our crushing work culture (especially for blue collar folks). The neoliberal capitalism alienates people from their labor and their fellow worker, and makes widely available drugs, alcohol, and ultra-processed foods to numb the pain after a long shift. We've created a machine that's very good at crushing people up to turn them into money for people who will never be able to spend what they have already (cf. the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic or Bezos and workers urinating in bottles).
America has so much potential. I still have great hope we can come together. Right now, it's like the Onion wrote: "'No Way to Prevent This', Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens". We have to stop pretending we don't know the solution. The jig is up. I feel like we're in the movie Fury. Everyone knows Germany is doomed, but more people have to die because of Hitler's ego and the cowardice of everyone around him. We've let the psychopaths run things for too long. We have to take our power back.
- CEOs/wealthy folks are more likely to be psychopaths vs. the average population (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...) - Power disables empathy (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/20190...) - Normal Americans have basically zero power - all decisions are made by the elites/special interest groups (https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...)
Add in a personal attack, and the common right-wing trope of "I wanted to agree with you but you said it wrong so now I must punish you," and, baby, you got a conservative stew going.
A person in South Carolina will have a different life from someone in say Santa Barbara, California.
Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark.
If America had a government and voting populace that actually cared about each other and weren't afraid to have universal free healthcare, we wouldn't see the problems that exist within the data?
America is a pretty fake place.
West Virginia's problems are West Virginia's problems and have no effect on anyone living a perfectly wonderful life in California.
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxe...
Everybody gets that richer states get better LE.
and as the npr article from a couple days ago and this point out https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799742228144130 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931
the gap is there at all ages.
And that is before we get into the entire bit where the data shows that most of the difference comes from lives lost at mid age (betwqeen ages 5 and 40), which is younger than the range where "being fat" typically catches up to you.
As a European who lives in USA and visits back frequently: can confirm.
In Europe I fight to keep weight on, in USA I fight to keep weight off. Despite counting calories, working out like a maniac[1], and predominantly eating clean. Pre-packaged highly processed foods are like a 1x/month thing, takeout happens max 2x/week, and eating out once or twice per week.
And yet, USA wants to make me fat while EU feels like I can barely eat enough to maintain weight.
[1] my usual week is 7 workouts split between cardio and hiit. Right now I'm in marathon training so going to hit 107km of running this week.
Lying with statistics is very easy, there is a book about it: https://amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039331...
A quick check says this is not true, with the US being at 74 and Scotland at 76. I don't know which sources are correct though, but maybe you can post yours since I didn't find that anywhere.
I wonder how this would look if you separate the data by race and average weight?
^ Thread and link to article.
- the concept of "race" ("ethnicity" would be a better word?) will vary depending on culture, and the intial split of populations + 2 centuries should be enough to bring significant divergences. When you say "asians" I'd fully expect the composition of that group to be a lot different on each sides of the pond.
- I don't expect the UK to have widely available etchnically separated data. They do check the repartition on census, but would they refer to that on death stats ? I could be wrong but that seems complicated on many aspects.
Then having thoroughly spoiled the weekend for everyone else, they'll pile into their idiotic loud car that they can't really afford the payments on, and fuck off back to their idiotic trashy house that they can't really afford the payments on?
Then yes, it is.
Clearly HN user Yeknoda never bothered to read it.
Spoiler Alert:
The disparity persists across all races, ages, and incomes.
Comparing health outcomes of white Americans of Anglo descent to health outcomes in England would be much more informative. Even more informative would be data that look at white people (and other groups such as Chinese, Indians, etc.) in the US on a county-by-county basis.
The truth is that there are certain groups in the United States whose outcomes are much worse on many statistical bases, and those groups skew the data dramatically downwards. Black people in the US, for example, commit a majority of murders every year [1], despite being only about 13% of the population - almost 4x what the rate would be, if they committed murder at the same rate as white people.
Other disparities are present as well, which mean that there are many communities in the United States where you will live a life just as long and healthy, or even longer and healthier, than in European countries. For example, this article [2] shows a county-by-county breakdown, and many counties in America where life expectancy is over 80.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-riley-the-other-ferguson-... [2] https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizen...
Edit: Absolutely love the downvote for this
To some extent in the West, but especially in Asia, we're really starting to see the demographic issues that come with people living for too long.
Aging populations, plummeting birthrates, redirection of public resources away from children and families...
Maybe we shouldn't be trying as hard as we are to drag on life into the late 80s and beyond.
The decline in life expectancy in the US is not being driven by more rapid decline in the aging population but by young people dying earlier exerting influence over the entire curve.
I can assure you that the burden of age related conditions will continue to grow but that again is because the largest generation humans have ever produced is aging out. And on the most part they’re more functional and able later into their senescence than ever before thanks to hip replacements and laser eye surgery and all the rest.