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The author misses that most OECD countries game these statistics (eg decrease childhood mortality by requiring 3 breaths to issue birth certificate) in response

The author misses that most OECD countries game these statistics (eg decrease childhood mortality by requiring 3 breaths to issue birth certificate) in response to internal political pressures you just don’t see in the US.

dsomers 4y ago
Can you give evidence of a developed country where that’s the case? Because I grew up right on the Canadian/US border, I have family and friends on both sides. It’s really easy for me to see why Canadians live longer than Americans. Poor Canadians have access to preventive medicine in a way poor Americans don’t because of our universal healthcare system. This prevents a lot of illness that are easily to stop in early stages but hard to stop in late stages from killing people. But it’s a really common thing for Americans under the influence of their radical corporate propaganda to wave things like universal healthcare away and just say with no evidence that other countries are cheating with numbers. No need to disrupt the amazing profits of your corporate health providers just to do something silly like save the lives of poor people —- they should really have worked harder if they didn’t want to die of cancer anyways. You know what my lived truth is? Before Canada had more advanced health cards and systems for keeping patient records, it was a common thing in my city for poor Americans to try to defraud our health system just so they could get basic treatment. But yeah buddy, keep believing the lies that we’re just counting infant mortality differently.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The article suggests that wealthier subsets of the populations live longer in other wealthy countries than America and wealthy Americans generally do have access to healthcare[1]. And immigrants to the US also live particularly long so maybe they are wealthy and get good healthcare or maybe there’s something else to it. The article also suggests some issues may be due to the way cities in the US are laid out which doesn’t really result from some kind of corporate propaganda or conspiracy, but then Canadian cities are quite similarly laid out. It seems like a pretty messy nuanced topic that can’t be reduced to single US policies. [1] perhaps their wealthy groups were eg 80%ile of the population by wealth and biased differently due to how people make money in different countries, or perhaps you need a smaller group for wealthy Americans to perform better, or perhaps they picked some dollar threshold so the American group was proportionally poorer or broader as America is richer in general. I don’t really know how that comparison was made though.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
This feels so immensely specific you might want to share where you even got this information from
Barrin92 4y ago
that sounds like just about the only thing on that list that you could imagine to be a statistical artifact rather than self-evidently true. You know what you just don't see in Japan, Korea or Europe? Anything else on that list. The rate of obesity, gun deaths, car accidents, entire regions ravaged by opioids and so on. In the entirety of England and Wales, that's 60 million people, the police has about 0-3 fatal shootings per year.
- stop50 4y ago
  I have a hard time to remember when was the last school shooting. It must have been around 10 years ago. In the us my guess would be at maximum a month ago and that is an optimistic guess.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Wasn’t it school summer holidays recently in the US? Surely that should make you change your prior.
    - mtrycz2 4y ago
      Acutally last was August 21[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Sure the UK doesn't have the freedom to arm and defend yourself but it also doesn't have freedom of speech or freedom of expression.
vanderZwan 4y ago
So the majority of OECD countries is cheating at statistics except the US? Do you have the exceptional evidence to go along with such an exceptional claim?
- jmeister 4y ago
  From a reputable demographer: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 "what's going on here is that the US is actually reporting "pregnancy related mortality," a formally separate concept, and that's why literally every international organization puts like 19 asterisks after the US data and says DO NOT COMPARE"
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    This is an interesting link and the story seems plausible. I’m glad you commented it. It’s also not related to how child/adult mortality in general are calculated, or to other countries ‘lying’ anymore than if one country produced statistics for 18-30 year olds and another for 21-30 year olds: the data is just not directly comparable.
    - jmeister 4y ago
      Yes it’s much narrower in scope than GP’s sweeping claim, but the prior should be that there are general differences in data between US and EU owing to lack of universal IT systems and differing attitudes towards privacy.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Nonsense.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It’s true though. This is literally actually true. Saying “nonsense” because you want America to be bad at things doesn’t make it so.
sokoloff 4y ago
That actually sounds fairly reasonable as a threshold of “this is a live birth”. I’m not going to spend hours debating in my head whether it should 1, 3, 5, or 0-with-other-criteria, but someone has to make that determination.
- thayne 4y ago
  But if the US is using different criteria than other countries, then it isn't really fair to compare those numbers. It's not clear to me if the statistics in that paper used the same criteria for considering a birth to be a live birth in the US as in europe.
yakak 4y ago
It might be fair to say that statistics vary a bit on definitions, but mother mortality is defined by the UN and the difference is much more pronounced because of US "internal political pressures".

dsomers 4y ago

Can you give evidence of a developed country where that’s the case? Because I grew up right on the Canadian/US border, I have family and friends on both sides. It’s really easy for me to see why Canadians live longer than Americans. Poor Canadians have access to preventive medicine in a way poor Americans don’t because of our universal healthcare system. This prevents a lot of illness that are easily to stop in early stages but hard to stop in late stages from killing people. But it’s a really common thing for Americans under the influence of their radical corporate propaganda to wave things like universal healthcare away and just say with no evidence that other countries are cheating with numbers. No need to disrupt the amazing profits of your corporate health providers just to do something silly like save the lives of poor people —- they should really have worked harder if they didn’t want to die of cancer anyways. You know what my lived truth is? Before Canada had more advanced health cards and systems for keeping patient records, it was a common thing in my city for poor Americans to try to defraud our health system just so they could get basic treatment. But yeah buddy, keep believing the lies that we’re just counting infant mortality differently.

dan-robertson 4y ago
The article suggests that wealthier subsets of the populations live longer in other wealthy countries than America and wealthy Americans generally do have access to healthcare[1]. And immigrants to the US also live particularly long so maybe they are wealthy and get good healthcare or maybe there’s something else to it. The article also suggests some issues may be due to the way cities in the US are laid out which doesn’t really result from some kind of corporate propaganda or conspiracy, but then Canadian cities are quite similarly laid out. It seems like a pretty messy nuanced topic that can’t be reduced to single US policies. [1] perhaps their wealthy groups were eg 80%ile of the population by wealth and biased differently due to how people make money in different countries, or perhaps you need a smaller group for wealthy Americans to perform better, or perhaps they picked some dollar threshold so the American group was proportionally poorer or broader as America is richer in general. I don’t really know how that comparison was made though.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

This feels so immensely specific you might want to share where you even got this information from

Barrin92 4y ago

that sounds like just about the only thing on that list that you could imagine to be a statistical artifact rather than self-evidently true. You know what you just don't see in Japan, Korea or Europe? Anything else on that list. The rate of obesity, gun deaths, car accidents, entire regions ravaged by opioids and so on. In the entirety of England and Wales, that's 60 million people, the police has about 0-3 fatal shootings per year.

stop50 4y ago
I have a hard time to remember when was the last school shooting. It must have been around 10 years ago. In the us my guess would be at maximum a month ago and that is an optimistic guess.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Wasn’t it school summer holidays recently in the US? Surely that should make you change your prior.
  - mtrycz2 4y ago
    Acutally last was August 21[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
Sure the UK doesn't have the freedom to arm and defend yourself but it also doesn't have freedom of speech or freedom of expression.

vanderZwan 4y ago

So the majority of OECD countries is cheating at statistics except the US? Do you have the exceptional evidence to go along with such an exceptional claim?

jmeister 4y ago
From a reputable demographer: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1555923442112815105 "what's going on here is that the US is actually reporting "pregnancy related mortality," a formally separate concept, and that's why literally every international organization puts like 19 asterisks after the US data and says DO NOT COMPARE"
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  This is an interesting link and the story seems plausible. I’m glad you commented it. It’s also not related to how child/adult mortality in general are calculated, or to other countries ‘lying’ anymore than if one country produced statistics for 18-30 year olds and another for 21-30 year olds: the data is just not directly comparable.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    Yes it’s much narrower in scope than GP’s sweeping claim, but the prior should be that there are general differences in data between US and EU owing to lack of universal IT systems and differing attitudes towards privacy.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Nonsense.

flappyeagle 4y ago
It’s true though. This is literally actually true. Saying “nonsense” because you want America to be bad at things doesn’t make it so.

sokoloff 4y ago

That actually sounds fairly reasonable as a threshold of “this is a live birth”. I’m not going to spend hours debating in my head whether it should 1, 3, 5, or 0-with-other-criteria, but someone has to make that determination.

thayne 4y ago
But if the US is using different criteria than other countries, then it isn't really fair to compare those numbers. It's not clear to me if the statistics in that paper used the same criteria for considering a birth to be a live birth in the US as in europe.

yakak 4y ago

It might be fair to say that statistics vary a bit on definitions, but mother mortality is defined by the UN and the difference is much more pronounced because of US "internal political pressures".