9 ms·

I see lots of exotic hypothesis being tossed around, but none of them fit Singapore, which is only slightly behind Spain/Japan. The Singaporean lifestyle is one

• ekianjo 8y ago
  No, I dont think the medical care is that much of a big factor. I think what matters for countries involved is "family care". I.e. how much are your siblings/relatives/kids going to take care of you as you get old. Compare this with the survival of people who are left alone in nursing homes, they lose many years of their potential lives. Medical care will only take care of your biology, but that's only half of the battle.
  • tonmoy 8y ago
    Why don’t you think medical care is a big factor? Do you have any logical reason or data to back that claim up? If what you think is right and family care is more important factor, then life expectancy would have been way higher in the past (which it wasn’t). Moreover countries like Bangladesh would be high in the life expectancy chart along with Singapore.
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      What I mean is that it's not the biggest differentiator among developed countries. Not talking about developing vs developed countries here. Basically what makes you an outlier in terms of longevity is not medical care.
  • onetimemanytime 8y ago
    >>No, I dont think the medical care is that much of a big factor. I think what matters for countries involved is "family care". I.e. how much are your siblings/relatives/kids going to take care of you as you get old. Compare this with the survival of people who are left alone in nursing homes, they lose many years of their potential lives. Isn't Japan notorious for doing the opposite? At least it made the news.... "Several reasons for the increase in kodokushi have been proposed. One proposed reason is increased social isolation. A decreasing proportion of elderly Japanese people are living in multi-generational housing and are instead living alone.[6] Elderly people who live alone are more likely to lack social contacts with family and neighbors, and are therefore more likely to die alone and remain undiscovered." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      > Isn't Japan notorious for doing the opposite? At least it made the news.... It's not because it makes the news that it's quantitatively important. Murders make the news in Japan the whole time yet Japan is one of the safest countries around.
• maoistinquisitr 8y ago
  Americans live the same as Cubans and Mexicans. Health care is irrelevant as best I can tell. The issue is diet and lifestyle. This leads to important realizations, such as that Americans should spend less than half as much as they do on doctors and drugs. They could work less on that basis, which would prolong their lives.
• wallace_f 8y ago
  I agree, but US healthcare needs cost- and incentive-structure reformation, which medicare-for-all will not accomplish. Also, SG's are very thin. A big contrast to Americans. Another point: SG seems to have crazy-lax food service regulation compared to USA. Hawker centers are everywhere. Many make a living serving delicious, inexpensive foods this way. I would propose there is little to nothing to show for some of the US's hyper-aggressive food regulations leading to governments pouring bleach on food, or private charities holding secret events to help homeless people in America.
  • jpatokal 8y ago
    Food regulation in Singapore is the opposite of "crazy-lax". Every hawker stall is regularly inspected and has the inspection results prominently posted, and despite being outside, the hawker centres are clean and sterilized to within an inch of their lives (there are no flies anywhere!). If people get sick from eating hawker food, it's headline news.
    • wallace_f 8y ago
      I've seen the inspection notices, but I was thinking of it more from a civil liberties standpoint than an "ability to serve unsanitary food" standpoint. In other words: how practical is it for an Everyperson to own/operate a restaurant? I haven't personally owned restaurants in both SG and USA, but what I understand is it is way easier in SG in terms of red tape, capital, insurance etc. I think that's a very valid criticism.
      • yukonbound 8y ago
        In my experience the food in Singapore is fantastic. Especially in the foods halls. The food in America is diabolical. The amount of processed food with too much salt, sugar and fat makes you ill after a while. For the difference in health outcomes I’d start to look here. Especially as poor people have very little healthy options in the states.
• maoistinquisitr 8y ago
  Singapore is an IQ meat grinder. High IQ people move there and have 0.5 children per woman. IQ is the single best predictor of longevity. This is because IQ is a product of high functioning metabolic processes in general. The same people that have high IQs are going to to tend to tolerate toxins and stress better and live longer.
• triviatise 8y ago
  absolutely not. The US has some demographic issues. African americans have a very high infant mortality rate that is irrespective of socioeconomic class. African americans also have a very high teen murder rate. Americans are very obese due to having a terrible diet and our heart disease kills more proportionally than our peer countries. If you look at life expectancy of various ethnicities they are comparable to their countries of origin. If you look at life expectancy after 40 (where people are using medical care) the gap between the US and europe closes (but not completely).
  • tonmoy 8y ago
    Teen homicide rate in US is less than 10 per 100,000. So if the 99,990 people live to be 75 and the 10 teens die at 13, teen homicide would lower the life expectancy from 75 to 74.9938. So teen homicide does not contribute any significance to life expectancy
  • takee 8y ago
    It is unclear from the article if lifespans presented in the calculations include those impacted by homicides/accidents or only natural causes.
• busboybus 8y ago
  Healthcare is irrelevant. Mexicans and Cubans have horrible health care and live the same as Americans. It boils down to inborn physiological health and lifestyle. Inborn in the sense that IQ is highly predictive of lifespan, because IQ highly correlates with overall physiological health. Singaporeans live a long time because Singapore is a genetic IQ meatgrinder. High IQ people move there and have zero kids. Americans would clearly live a lot longer than they do if they spent less on healthcare. Healthcare is currently about 20% of USA GDP and we do no better than Mexico, which spends less than 9% of GDP on a much lower cost basis. Ergo, Americans could work four days a week, renounce health care, and live much longer than they do right now.
  • crooked-v 8y ago
    > Inborn in the sense that IQ is highly predictive of lifespan, because IQ highly correlates with overall physiological health. Correlation is not causation, and many other factors correlate to both lifespan and IQ, neither of which are entirely a result of genetics.
    • busboybus 8y ago
      I didn't say otherwise?! Defensive much? IQ is the single best predictor of lifespan. I think this is because ability to perform well on an IQ test means cellular metabolism is operating well in the organism.
      • SamReidHughes 8y ago
        Part of the correlation would be caused by unhealthy smart people and healthy not-so-smart people being able to attract one another. Another would be noncellular things like quality of sleep.
      • dragonwriter 8y ago
        > IQ is the single best predictor of lifespan [Citation needed]
  • JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
• bluerobotcat 8y ago
  > Singapore is known to have a great medical system, even for those not well off. You're spot on with respect to diet. I believe Singapore has the highest rate of diabetes in the developed world. With respect to supposed excellent medical care, some problems in Singapore that I noticed: - There is little access to preventative medical care. If you do get preventative medical care it tends to be very expensive (scan all the things!). In my home country, I would get a yearly test for glaucoma as my grandmother was affected and it's genetic, but in Singapore this is quite unheard of (I tried once and was subjected to a battery of tests that cost hundreds of dollars). In my home country most people get yearly dental care, but there's no such thing in Singapore. - People change doctors a lot, which I think is problematic. However, you're kind of forced to change doctors every time you change companies or if your company switches to a different health insurance provider. - Strong drugs are available over the counter, no questions asked. GPs also happily give out way too many drugs for minor issues. - People in Singapore can end up losing all their money if they get a serious illness. - Strong promotion of pseudo-medicine, such as TCM. It is legitimized even by otherwise respect universities, which may have TCM research centers. After a GP visit, it's also common that you get some pseudo-scientific medicine from the secretary handling your payment (e.g. 'don't eat chicken'). I'm not so much arguing against your hypothesis. However, I worry that optimizing for life span might not mean that people are healthier. In fact, in some countries, death is sometimes chosen over necessarily prolonging life: - Euthanasia - Getting very expensive, painful/dulling medical procedures that end up prolonging your life is discouraged by doctors in some countries
  • ptenk 8y ago
    Brushing off TCM as pseudoscience is quite ignorant. There are plenty of legitimate TCM research and verified treatments that have improved the lives of many in the world.
    • matthewbauer 8y ago
      Traditional medicine that is shown to be effective is no longer traditional. It’s modern medicine.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  This. Life expectancy is a measure of the population's ability to keep the infants from dying, bubble wrap the world so the 15-25yo men don't kill themselves and then provide good medical care so the seniors can squeak by with their oxygen. It says very little about quality of life.
• gok 8y ago
  See also Asian-Americans, who can already expect to live to 86.5 today (ahead of every country) despite stereotypically high stress lives and no universal healthcare. https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/life-expectancy-by-re/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/life-expectancy-by...
  • benmarten 8y ago
    it might be the food though. my wife is asian and I haven't seen any dairy or undercooked meat products in their dishes.
    • drb91 8y ago
      What gives you the impression undercooked meat (which seems to beg the question, let alone dairy) affects longevity negatively? A basic survey of research seems to offer highly ambiguous findings.
      • jraby3 8y ago
        It’s very difficult to test diets on humans. Best study to date is the China Study. It looked at Chinese villages that had different diets and shows that eating meat and dairy is correlated to lower life expectancy and more diseases. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-results-of-the-China-Study https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-results-of-the-China-Stud...
        • bonzini 8y ago
          The China Study is garbage and mostly detected hidden variables. People eating more meat were often living near (polluted) cities, smoking more, etc.
          • jraby3 8y ago
            While I don’t agree the study is garbage their are limitations and imperfections to every study. Another great example was cancer rates in Norway from 1929-1948. In 1939, Norway lost almost all meat to the Nazi’s and you can see cancer rates drop immediately and significantly. In 1945 after the war ends cancer rates quickly rise again. Check out the documentary forks instead of knives to see more examples like this.
• awl130 8y ago
  singapore is a city disguising itself as a country. there's your answer. for comparison, compare singapore to the richest urban areas of its peers and you will see that advantage go away most likely
  • graeme 8y ago
    People always forget this. It applies to per capita incomes too.
  • trextrex 8y ago
    Similarly the population of many of the Nordic countries is comparable to mid to large cities in US/Asia.
    • scirocco 8y ago
      Still not fair just to look at the population. Sweden is twice the size of UK
• cblum 8y ago
  > The Singaporean lifestyle is one of the most stressful, competitive and insecure in the world. I'm curious about this. Can you point me to any resources to learn more about that? Or could you elaborate on why it is so, especially the "insecure" part?
  • ungamedplayer 8y ago
    The insecure part may mean that there is almost no social protection. And the city changes so very frequently.
  • sn41 8y ago
    Many jobs on offer in Singapore tend to be limited-time contractual. Also, there are no pensions. If you do get fired, it is not a large country with a lot of alternative opportunities.
    • tim333 8y ago
      On the other hand unemployment is 2% in Singapore vs 15% in Spain.
  • whack 8y ago
    I've spent many years living in Singapore. People are very hard working, competitive, materialistic and status conscious. A combination which leads to long works hours and work-stress. The fact that there's minimal social safety net, certainly doesn't help either. I recall reading some studies that came to the same conclusions as above, but I don't have them handy at the moment.
    • cblum 8y ago
      I didn't know the safety net was minimal there. For whatever reason, I thought it was more like Western European countries. Does that lead to a lot of homelessness and crime?
      • whack 8y ago
• paraditedc 8y ago
  Having lived in Singapore for 10 years, I can think of some factors: Low crime rate. Less crime, less death and injuries. High percentage of old people working. Working means more money to sustain life and pay medical bills. CPF. You and your employer pay a percentage of your salary to government as CPF. This will be used for medical insurance and pension. Good air quality and cleanliness in general. Helps in certain diseases.
  • lostlogin 8y ago
    Are you saying the air in Singapore is good? Or that clean air is good?
    • paraditedc 8y ago
      Both.
  • abainbridge 8y ago
    > High percentage of old people working. Also means old people carry on getting exercise and feeling like they are a useful part of society.
• randomsearch 8y ago
  > This is probably also the reason USA is doing so badly. If you're in the bottom quintile, the quality and availability of medical care is awful. I've read several times that medical outcomes across the board are worse in the US than in European countries with national health systems - i.e. even for the richest, privatised healthcare doesn't work (on average).
  • bonzini 8y ago
    Singapore and Switzerland both have privatized healthcare, but it is extremely regulated at the same time.
    • emn13 8y ago
      In a way, that's true of the US too; and various (perhaps most?) european systems have most care provided privately - with whatever regulations apply. The framing of "privatized" vs. government health care is, IMNSHO a holdover from the cold war when everything needed to be as ideologically distinct from USSR as possible. Now, it's just corrosive. This isn't a dichotomy; it's not even really a gradual scale - it's typically a whole host of choices of how to set up those regulations. Presuming in advance that privatization is a good (or bad) thing simply leads to worse outcomes.
      • bonzini 8y ago
        US healthcare is absolutely not regulated on the same level as Swiss or Singaporean healthcare.
        • jeffbax 8y ago
          It is probably regulated in a far more complicated manner. Singapore has forced savings accounts for basic care (out of pocket spending drives costs down), less barriers to entry into the medical profession (thus more doctors at lower wages than the US), less regulation that results in non-competitive hospital and medical practice like in the US. It's far more effective at delivering high quality at low cost due to more market forces. They spend 3% GDP for excellent results vs 16-20 in the US which is a regulatory death by a thousand cuts. Catastrophic care is covered by the government but this is far more efficient than universal systems elsewhere. If you think US Healthcare is a problem of a lack of regulation you don't understand US Healthcare… https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Singapore%20Healthcare%20site%3Amarginalrevolution.com https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Singapore%20Healthcare...
• cauldron 8y ago
  Rich people live longer, simple as that.
• maxerickson 8y ago
  Access to healthcare doesn't really explain the US, at least according to the same people talking about Japan and Spain: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/some-parts-of-the-us-have-a-lower-life-expectancy-than-iraq-and-north-korea https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/some-parts-of-the-us-... If you consider that Medicaid tends to be quite focused on outcomes (spending money where it's effective) and covers ~1/4 of the country, this isn't surprising. Better diets and less drug use should both be rather cheap to impact at a policy level. I think much of the problem is that it's popular in the US to oppose the government having policies that would improve the quality of life of poor people.
• tim333 8y ago
  There's also drug abuse - very low in Singapore (they execute drug dealers), high in the US ("Drug overdoses killed more than 72,000 people in the United States last year – a new record driven by the deadly opioid epidemic").
• austincheney 8y ago
  > If we ever instituted medicare-for-all I don't understand what medicare for all seeks to accomplish that isn't already available with medicaid.
  • lsc 8y ago
    >I don't understand what medicare for all seeks to accomplish that isn't already available with medicaid. Medicaid is only available for the extremely poor; Many states have expanded this after the ACA passed, but my understanding is that there's still a pretty good gap between where you qualify for medicaid and where health insurance is affordable in much of the country.
  • digitalzombie 8y ago
    I don't know if you're joking or not but: Medicaid only help the poorest. You need to be at a certain income to get it. I am a graduate student that is currently on it. Medicare-for-all helps everybody regardless of income. Everybody is entitle to it regardless if you're poor.
    • selimthegrim 8y ago
      To wit; 400% of the poverty line (spoken as another grad student who was on Medicaid for most of the year)