Americans dying younger than their English-speaking peers worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Americans dying younger than their English-speaking peers worldwide

studyfinds.org

20 pointspseudolus65 comments

I would be more interested to see natural death rates compared. Including homicide and drug overdose just mixes different groups and doesn’t give a good understanding of how possible is long life.

The comparison is seemingly a lot narrower at the top: if you make it to retirement, your life expectancy is comparable to the rest of the west. Doesn't mean the deaths of young people aren't important.

> if you make it to retirement, your life expectancy is comparable to the rest of the west

Figure 1 from the paper clearly shows the USA has the worst for life expectancy at age 65 for both women and men compared to the other wealthy Anglosphere nations.

It's surprising that the issue of premature deaths doesn't resonate more with the general public as opposed to so many other seemingly minor issues with much less of a personal impact. I wonder whether it's due to apathy or a sense that the issue is simply too complex to resolve.

You can see from the conversation in this thread that people invoke "personal responsibility": those dying young are other Americans, and people are happy to think that they personally are making better choices.

It is simple to resolve the criminality but the voters have decided they don’t like the answer (much more policing and incarceration)

These are just palliative solutions. Avoiding to create criminals is far more relevant for building a sane society.

Also avoiding to import criminals, see Sweden - where I live - for a good example of where that can lead [1]. For the naysayers and label-throwers I can only point at the statistics in the knowledge that these are immune to accusations of racism (et al).

There's also a UN report which lifts up Sweden as an exception to the rule that violent crime is on the wane [2, page 119]: Sweden has experienced unprecedented levels of gang violence and firearm-related deaths in recent years ... Sweden had one of the highest levels of firearm-related deaths in a study over 20 European countries

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriminalstatistik_i_Sverige#/m...

[2] https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/2023/G...

how do you propose to do that?

Telling that taking aspirine won't eliminate the root cause of the pain doesn't imply we know what are the actual root causes, and even less what would heal the person.

Obviously, this is a complexe social topic. To pretend to provide a panacea of all criminality generation all by oneself is asking too much for any individual.

No, it's simple. Policing works

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1302

The number one indicator for crime, almost tautologically, is having previously committed a crime[1]. Keeping violent criminals in jail prevents future crimes, it is fundamentally not the same as just putting a band-aid on a cut. "Avoiding to create criminals" is less important than preventing crimes, as the same small group of offenders is often at fault for the same crime [2].

[1] https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2018/12/18/crimehistory [2] https://www.silive.com/news/2023/04/nyc-shoplifting-report-s...

None of the countries that are doing far better than us have anywhere near the level of incarceration that we suffer.

Asian countries have far harsher punishments for drug offenses, and their societal outcomes are better than both America's or Europe's.

In most of Asia doing drugs (aside from the "normal" ones like alcohol and tobacco) is also considered something good people don't do.

Here (USA) billionaires microdose acid and take molly in the desert. The culture around drugs is entirely different.

Drug use was extremely prevalent in Asia's early modern history. They stamped it out with harsh enforcement.

Maybe the US will end up learning a similar lesson.

those billionaires should be in jail

Which Asian countries would you say are doing better than Finland and Norway?

While Singapore has a lot of things going for it I wouldn't really consider it more free than Norway, even if drug consumption is substantially restricted there.

The US is usually judged against the Scandinavian countries by comparing homicide rates, so use the same to compare Singapore to the Scandinavian countries and you'll see that Singapore does much better.

You could do the comparison using other crimes instead, but bodies are a more concrete metric. By the way, it's not just Singapore.

compare the murder rate of Nigeria (20) with Japan (0.2) and you begin to understand the nature of the challenges with law enforcement in the US

We already have more % population in jail than any other country. Mostly for drugs. The social cost is much less for getting in trouble for drugs in the US, but the incarceration rate is really high.

Most "premature death" isn't really random and individuals can eliminate most (not all) of their risk by making the right choices. For instance, choosing not to drink and drive significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the risk of dying in a car crash. Choosing not to be a drug dealer reduces the risk of being shot. Choosing not to be a paraglider reduces the risk of dying in an accident.

Of course some people, for political reasons, want to pretend that such choices don't exist and anybody who thinks they can have any control over their life is delusional. Rejecting such sentiments is the healthy choice.

That's right, American homicide is not stochastic. It is far more likely to happen to a person who is themselves a criminal. Not being a habitual criminal cuts your risk of becoming a homicide victim by an order of magnitude. Suicide has a similar solution: if you're worried that you or someone in your household will kill your/themselves, not owning a gun slashes that risk by a large factor.

You're forgetting the frequent tragedies of mass school shootings that are more or less an entirely American phenomenon and affect innocent people at random.

The knock-on effect of these events in American communities must be horrific. How many victims who survive them directly or who lose their loved ones to them fall into deaths by despair or go on to live severely blunted lives that cause them to act out in ways that are detrimental to your society?

That's but a microcosm of the kind of stuff that Americans deal with that people in other countries don't. It isn't normal and it isn't something that your average citizen can just avoid by choosing better.

I am not forgetting about them, but they are demographically irrelevant.

ETA: In the 25 years ending 2022, 122 people died in school shootings. That's 5 people per year. There are ~3000 homicides every year of Americans under age 20.

Can you show me the numbers on that?

Can you talk more about the second order effects of watching your classmates die or feeling terrified that the same will happen to your own children?

As long as you raise the temperature slowly, the frog won't even notice.

My impression as an outsider is that America is the kind of country where a sizeable minority of people believe it is very important they be able to ride a motorbike without a helmet.

Not necessarily because they personally want to ride a motorbike - but as a matter of principle. That government should govern as little as possible, that the fewer laws there are the more freedom people have, and that if you're not harming others the government should get out of your way.

They would say if while riding a motorbike without a helmet you should crash and die that's tragic, but the price of freedom is that sometimes people will make bad decisions.

I don't agree with this personally - but I can understand why American lawmakers would have a bias towards inaction.

> I don't agree with this personally

There are an infinite number of ways to kill yourself, degrade your health, or commit actions that lower your overall physical or financial fitness.

We can't put bubble wrap around all of it.

We evolved into this harsh physical world. We can be caring and educational and empathetic, but it's our universe to play in for a super short moment so long as we don't fuck it up for other people too.

Yeah my feeling is more that due to practical problems, the idea isn't universally applicable.

A motorbiker who dies in a crash isn't around to tell us he's cool with it, and his distraught family often won't be cool with it. So the "yeah the consequences are fine" voice often won't get heard.

A motorbiker who gets left in a wheelchair might have a change of heart, and sue someone for compensation. Who wouldn't, if millions of dollars are on offer?

Drunk driving endangers other road users and I support it being illegal, but some might say a drunk driver hasn't harmed others until they've actually caused an accident. Once you start adding in statistical harms done to society as a whole, that opens up a big can of worms.

I feel that legalising the supply of all addictive drugs probably wouldn't be good public policy.

However, I'm in favour of beer, porn, gay rights and music with offensive lyrics under the principle that if you're not harming anyone the government should get off your back.

I found it strange that the article lists gun violence higher than drug abuse or lifestyle choices. Drug overdose deaths are more than 4x higher than gun deaths (excluding suicide).

Why would you exclude gun deaths by suicide when comparing to drug deaths not excluding suicide?

I couldn't find data on drug deaths classified as suicide, at least not from CDC.

Ah fair enough. I guess it's probably a lot harder to tell the difference between accidental and deliberate overdose.

What exactly is to be done with information which speaks at this scale? I'm not asking in a facetious way.

Seriously, what do you, the consumer, do with this?

Thanks in advance.

Don't drive cars, take drugs, own guns, or do crimes. Do exercise and eat vegetables.

> Seriously, what do you, the consumer, do with this?

The comment chills me to the bone. Americans truly can not conceptualize themselves as anything _but_ a consumer. I mean, what can I say, other than "Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you."

I meant it more like "the consumer" not "The Consumer" but I could have said "the reader", "the observer", etc.

You got me curious, though. What do non-Americans do when they read if not consume what they read?

I had always assume it was generally to do with having the highest obesity rate for English speaking developed countries. It is interesting to see other factors thrown into the equation. I am curious, how relevant is (for example) gun violence as a percentage of tje total number? I also had never considered the healthcare system as a factor.

I kinda think the US model is: We encourage people to come here and get rich by all means. Life is stressful here and ordinary people's life sucks. But if you are rich enough you are getting the best of the world.

So I guess that's why Canadian doctors and nurses fled to the US, get rich and come back to enjoy. I plan to do the same if given the chance.

> United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Two of these are not at all like the others. Compare the US and England maybe, large population, heterogeneous.

If English is important, then add India. More people speak English there than any of these countries.

Really this is the US vs Australia with some other countries briefly mentioned.

Response to comments about EU food regulations being healthier:

Probably true in some cases. On the other hand, many of the food regulations in Europe are based off of little more than paranoid pseudoscience. For instance, nearly all irradiated foods are banned in Germany, with only dried herbs and spices exempted. There's no good reason for this.

To make the case that the EUs food regulations are the reason for the lifespan discrepancy you'd at least have to eliminate factors like access to healthcare, violent deaths, drug overdoses, etc.

Not sure how this is relevant. Article is not mentioning EU nor are the comments.

What has speaking English got to do with life expectancy?

Large impact on cultural mindset through psycholinguistic means? Just wondering

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