Hacker News Reader

Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

These stats drive me up the wall because the US is more diverse than every single European country. The life expectancy in California is 81 and in Alabama it’s 74. That’s the difference between the UK and like, Latvia.

This matters because when you look at these crude aggregate stats, people naively assume that it means that everything is a bit worse but the actual American story is usually more like broad prosperity with some truly awful outcomes for anyone who falls through the (very wide) cracks.

View on HN

What a weird way of framing it. The USA is compared with EU, so it doesn't matter if USA is more diverse than single european countries. As you point out, EU is also very diverse.

But EU is more diverse than any single US state!

So like... nyeh

Surely the point was that the difference between internal regions of the EU and USA are much higher than that between the averages. Someone worried about lifespan in either would do much better to look at local outcomes and the reasons for them (c.f. figuring out why Latvia lags the France, or what's wrong in Alabama that Massachusetts is so far ahead) than it is to dither over what the people across the ocean are doing.

these oversimplified averages don’t really reflect anyone’s actual situation either

The stats comparison is of the US and the whole of Europe.

The difference between states is big but you go on to say that it's as big as the difference between two European countries. Your comparison only points out Europe is as least as diverse as the US and still has a significantly higher life expectancy.

EU has a bunch of states that have been in the Soviet Block not so long ago, even 3 countries from the USSR. This is way more diverse than USA at least as far as the economics go.

> These stats drive me up the wall because the US is more diverse than every single European country.

Are you seriously to claim that the EU is a single country? Or that there are no differences between EU countries? That link actually has a table of all EU countries, and it ranges from 72 to 83. This is actually a LARGER difference than in the US: where it ranges from 74 to 82.

You need to read what's actually being said before climbing up the walls.

> more diverse than every single European country

by what metric?

Are you ready doubting whether the US as whole are more diverse than any single European country?

Yes, that's a very US centric view. There are European countries, such as France and the Netherlands that have overseas territories and generally are quite diverse. Or Belgium with three official languages, where you can walk 10 km and suddenly most people speak another language.

The US as a whole might be more diverse than a single EU country, but it will depend a lot on your metric for diversity.

What's the point of comparing all US states to single European country? The same it doesn't make sense to compare all EU countries to single US state.

No, im asking by which metric.

Have you been to Europe? It's really diverse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com