20 ms·

The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

325 points by grecy 4y ago

HarryHirsch 4y ago
Christ Jesus, the USA are on average as good as Merthyr Tydfil, the epicenter of Welsh coal mining, which Maggie Thatcher destroyed. It's bad, but no one anticipated it to be that bad.
- suprjami 4y ago
  I'm not surprised at all. If you compare individual US states to other countries, some parts of the US south have worse healthcare systems than third-world nations. The US is by far the worst health country in the OECD.
  - slaw 4y ago
    At the same time US government spends the most in the world on socialized healthcare.
    - mhoad 4y ago
      Of course they do. Just look at how that entire system is set up. It’s very clearly a for profit driven industry first and foremost and a healthcare system in a very distant second place.
    - paxys 4y ago
      The US government spends the most in the world on subsidizing corporations for healthcare. There is nothing "socialized" about it. The public in general gets very little of that benefit. And that holds true even if you include Medicare.
      - slaw 4y ago
        I meant only Medicare and Medicaid. The US government spends on Medicare and Medicare more then any other country on healthcare.
        pessimizer 4y ago
        Don't forget the VA, but this stat always shocks people. I don't think people's brains can even hold on to it. It's important to use italics: The US government spends more on healthcare per capita than all socialized systems. The difference between life and death in the US isn't about paying lower taxes, it's purely rent-seeking; i.e. we pay once for healthcare, and we pay once again to the landlords of healthcare, directly out of our pockets.
        rolenthedeep 4y ago
        That's really only because healthcare is so absolutely insanely more expensive here. You'd have to normalize those numbers. It doesn't mean the same thing if the US spends a billion dollars on 1 million procedures when a more civilized society can do those same million procedures for 300 million.
        klooney 4y ago
        Between Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, there are more Americans with socialized healthcare than Britons in the NHS.
        HarryHirsch 4y ago
        Also - Medicare is for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and indigent, and the VA for current and former servicemen, neither of the three groups are good risks. You'd expect higher than average costs even in a well-run system.
        TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        There are also hundreds of thousands more Americans going bankrupt from healthcare costs. If Medi-* actually worked properly that wouldn't be happening.
        4y ago
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    I don't think it's really about healthcare. It's about everything else in life, that makes people obese or driven into a life of drugs (meth, etc.). Healthcare doesn't really save you from that.
    - 11101010001100 4y ago
      If you choose to look at drugs from a healthcare perspective, you'll find countries that have had some success....
    - IAmGraydon 4y ago
      It's not so much about the quality of healthcare as it is the price.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        You could have the best hospital for free — if you are sedentary, eat poorly, and engage in risky behavior, you will die sooner.
- shams93 4y ago
  Its actually worse, imagine all that with no social safety net, no functioning medical system. Here our medical and educational systems are so destroyed that not even the wealthy have a good outcome, wealth just enables their kids to get into addiction earlier than poor kids.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Yeah, well, as long as I can sling code for 100K+ a year in this fine country, it’s not my problem what happens thousands of miles away over in Mississippi. —HN
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Live fast, die young. What's the issue?
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Why don't they just e̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶k̶e̶ learn to code?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    Do you understand the irony of saying this when we're literally on a thread discussing and caring about the problem that is obviously more affecting the demographics that are non-HN'ers?
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      No. I don’t understand the love people have for molesting the word “irony”. 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.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
version_five 4y ago
No doubt there's a real underlying problem here. The abuse of comparison doesn't help anything though. I'd guess (but it's a guess) that average american life expectancy is going down because of some demographics who have it really bad (opioid users eg). That's an acute problem that has no meaning when averaged with everything else. Quoting averages makes it seem like there's some sort of broad malaise as opposed to specific issues for specific groups.
- roundandround 4y ago
  I think the Oxycontin/Purdue scam is pretty typical of how corruptions that were once targeted by the government to intentionally victimize minorities in ways not large enough to wash away other gains in overall life expectancy have spread to a difficulty in limiting industries victimizing larger more diverse groups in ways that undermine the stats the US was protecting.
- Clubber 4y ago
  Also, we have really expensive healthcare, so preventative medicine and recovery type treatment is not done nearly as much as other countries I suspect. You'd think something would change after the massive cracks in the system revealed to everybody by COVID, but it didn't.
- zhivota 4y ago
  If you have read the article you know it talks about how comparisons across income percentiles yield reductions in US life expectancy across every income level. It's not an isolated issue.
legitster 4y ago
"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." 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.
- jjevanoorschot 4y ago
  It’s not necessarily recklessness. 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.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I bet phone usage is also a factor. 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.
    - draw_down 4y ago
      [dead]
    - asdff 4y ago
      With T9 you could send a text with your one hand in your pocket. Try that with an iPhone...
      - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
        Text-to-speech is available on the iPhone, is it not? 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.
signal11 4y ago
I saw this other life-expectancy-related story a a while ago, and there are probably COVID-related reasons, but I’m surprised this hasn’t got more publicity: > 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 https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265 [2] https://www.newsweek.com/china-us-life-expectancy-birth-2021-fact-check-1740991 https://www.newsweek.com/china-us-life-expectancy-birth-2021...
Kalanos 4y ago
blackpool is the jersey shore of england?
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Is Jersey Shore full of bright orange people in cheap "fast fashion" clothing trying to pretend they're on roughly ten times as much money as they really make, who make a big show of ordering "expensive" vodka and flash their platinum credit card around as they chop their 30 quid bag of coke? 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.
  - jprd 4y ago
    That was disturbingly on point.
  - globalise83 4y ago
    Nice :)
  - Kalanos 4y ago
    why, yes
- rcarr 4y ago
  The british version of the tv show is geordie shore set in Newcastle, but the culture in most northern british coastal towns is the same. Essex however, is probably the most accurate comparison considering it has the pretty much the same culture but its close proximity to London mirrors Jersey’s proximity to New York.
Edd314159 4y ago
Blackpool catching strays on this one
hooverd 4y ago
[flagged]
- cpursley 4y ago
  At least it many parts of England there's still sidewalks.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    You've certainly got a better cycling mode share.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Can you name an American food that isn't brown? At least in the UK people eat vegetables that don't come from cans. Americans sure do love their bland fatty salty food, though.
  - tasty_freeze 4y ago
    The solution to a low quality HN comment is to downvote it, not to return the volley with another low quality comment.
    - hooverd 4y ago
      Hey, those munchies boxes look delicious!
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        It can be hit or miss. Some places just give you loads of chips and naan bread, which is a bit of a con. One near where I used to live had four different types of chicken chaat alone, which is kind of the opposite end of the scale. I guess curry isn't really a thing in the US?
imwithstoopid 4y ago
[flagged]
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Health is primarily a social enterprise, that's the point Clean water, sewage control, clean air, clean food, safe cities, prohibition on toxic chemicals in the environment, access to good information and appropriate care, disease control - hyper individual personal responsibility finger wagging won't get you anywhere to fixing these things and that's what the "there is no such thing as a society" people do not get because they've trained themselves to call those things socialism. These are the consequences of that pig headed pridefully ignorant ideology
reisse 4y ago
The title here is kind of misleading (need to report @dang, I think?). The tweet talks about healthy life expectancy, which is different from life expectancy overall: > 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)
- woobar 4y ago
  For comparison, healthy life expectancy in the UK [1] in 2020: 62.8 years. Some of these charts don't make sense. [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesuk/2018to2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
AussieWog93 4y ago
As fucked up as death is, I wonder if a lower life expectancy isn't the worst thing in the world. 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.
- robbiep 4y ago
  You haven’t understood the article. 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.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I don't think you understand the comment. If the life expectancy drops, there are fewer elderly to care for. If people don't make it to 70, you don't have to care for 70+ year Olds. It is a fair thought experiment to explore. Depending on what your priorities are, it could be optimal for everyone to die before retirement age.
    - imwithstoopid 4y ago
      its not like people are just healthy and then when they hit 70, poof! obese people will have health issues from early adulthood onward healthcare isn't the answer - the doctor says "lose weight", and people ignore it or make excuses and are even more obese at their next checkup
    - wetmore 4y ago
      Sure, but the problem is that there is not enough of a young population to support the older population. So if the life expectancy drops because younger people are dying more, that just makes the inbalance even worse, with the population being even more top heavy.
causality0 4y ago
Overall an excellent and correct thread. However I do have to take issue with his choice to equate comparing diverse and non-diverse areas to "adjusting for race". That is not what that is.
KarlKemp 4y ago
This is incredibly drastic data.
- anbende 4y ago
  Is it? The difference is in 2-4 year range for most of the chart. Is 2-4 years of life expectancy drastic? I didn't read it as such, but I'm not really sure how to assess how big that difference is, honestly...
  - PanopticonMan 4y ago
    2-4y of life expectancy is typically an even greater discrepancy is morbidity. So if you die 3y earlier and are 'morbid'/ have life affecting illness for another 2y - you've basically halved the average enjoyable period of retirement for most people. I'd say that's quite drastic.
pcurve 4y ago
each dot represents metro area representing 100k. I wonder how this would look if you separate the data by race and average weight?
- sparker72678 4y ago
  The article breaks it down; disparity is consistent across age, race, gender, income…
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Curious how you isolate for race between two separate continents ?
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      Both USA and UK have a sizeable subpopulations of people of European, African and Asian descent, large enough to have reasonably reliable statistics on them.
      - makeitdouble 4y ago
        I kinda expect it's just not possible for two main reasons: - 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.
  - pcurve 4y ago
    Article? I only see one chart? It doesn't mention anything about race and weight.
    - 4y ago
nicoburns 4y ago
This seems unsurprising given the drastic differences in typical diet and exercise levels, and the availability of healthcare.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Eh, we Brits are no models of good diet and exercise. According to [1] while Americans have the highest obesity rates among major countries, Brits have the third-highest obesity rates. [1] https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/21/british-people-fat-no-denying-7403863/ https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/21/british-people-fat-no-denying...
  - anbende 4y ago
    While that's true, the difference may still be enough to explain the 2-4 year difference in life expectancy that is shown on the chart.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    American breakfast cereal is probably a good example of the problem. In the UK, don't you have to buy stuff like Cinnamon Toast Crunch from speciality outlets? I was under the impression much of what passes for breakfast in the US is considered confectionary across the way.
    - Jabbles 4y ago
      Cinnamon Toast Crunch is 30% sugar: https://www.cinnamontoastcrunch.com/products/cinnamon-toast-crunch https://www.cinnamontoastcrunch.com/products/cinnamon-toast-... But something like Frosties, a popular cereal in the UK, is 37%: https://www.kelloggs.co.uk/en_GB/products/frosties.html 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.
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        I don't know if it makes much difference, but observe that the British cereal has a red mark for high sugar content on the box. It will be shelved near other cereals with green marks. 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.
EngManagerIsMe 4y ago
We've had decades of systematic removal of protections and healthcare for people. There is zero political interest in improving things (and even when there is some, it's opposed brutally.) 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.
makeitdouble 4y ago
The Financial Times column from where it comes from: https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/error-pages/expired-link?contentId=653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303 https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/error-pages/expired-link?c...
- Avshalom 4y ago
  here's a twitter thread with a lot more diagrams. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873
- fernly 4y ago
  Thanks, but the link has "expired".
  - apexalpha 4y ago
    Better link: https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303 https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...
xjlin0 4y ago
Obesity play a role in this. I wish the study can consider the body weight too.
- petschge 4y ago
  Sure. But is that a cause or an effect?
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Pretty sure dying early doesn't make you fat.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Americans are fatter because their food is toxic and their car centric lifestyle is sedentary and unhealthy
      - localplume 4y ago
        [dead]
    - eightysixfour 4y ago
      I think they meant is it the cause of dying early or an effect of whatever is killing Americans.
    - petschge 4y ago
      That part is easy. But did being fat lead to health problems (that then also kill you), or did health problems lead to being fat (which then also kills you)? 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.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
yeknoda 4y ago
Race/age correction please...
- jessaustin 4y ago
  You want USA to look worse? If so, by all means, emphasize our racial disparities.
  - bilbo0s 4y ago
    What's worse is that the article breaks it down by race, gender, income etc etc. Clearly HN user Yeknoda never bothered to read it. Spoiler Alert: The disparity persists across all races, ages, and incomes.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Sure there will be lots of hypotheses for why this is the case. In my experience, though, you can almost ignore longevity and just look at these sociological differences that make the quality of life better for the English: 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.
- nabla9 4y ago
  In the US rich people can get worse healthcare because doctors have incentive to provide unnecessary operations and medications due to 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/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/... drugs, traffic, diet, guns.
- roenxi 4y ago
  It seems pretty likely that the US healthcare decisions at the federal level are to blame. This data suggests it isn't the access to healthcare that is to blame as much as the governance of the entire system is forcing bad outcomes. The effect here is too widespread to be "pub culture". 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.
  - ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
hparadiz 4y ago
America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. A person in South Carolina will have a different life from someone in say Santa Barbara, California.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The US life expectancy has taken a nose dive in the last couple of years which other countries have not experienced.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark. https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
  - hparadiz 4y ago
    All I'm saying is pooling the entire United States into a single data point is fairly useless. We need to know which demographics are the ones bringing down the average the most in order to make moves that will improve this metric the most.
    - srge 4y ago
      It’s not useless because we are comparing countries. By breaking up a country you are basically changing the question to get a more favorable answer. Everybody gets that richer states get better LE.
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      But you're governed by one federal government, so this point isn't so relevant. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nmca 4y ago
It would be quite interesting to see with the x-axis unnormalised and; at the moment the equivalent American percentiles are probably materially richer than their UK counterparts, so the effect is larger than shown in real terms.
- nmca 4y ago
  Oops, that was the next tweet: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799667942866944?t=rgneng-baGCIdi4fGogYDw&s=19 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799667942866944?...
whakim 4y ago
The original article points out that the primary difference between the US and the UK (as well as other peer countries) is that you're much more likely to die young in the US. A 5-year-old in the United States has a 4% chance of dying before age 40, whereas a 5-year-old in Australia, Austria, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Switzerland has ~1% chance of dying before age 40 (values appear to range from ~0.9% to ~1.25%). This suggests that the US's shorter lifespans aren't primarily caused by poorer healthcare outcomes, but rather social problems like drug overdoses, gun violence, and car accidents.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  Woah! 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.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    Youth suicide has always been pretty bad in the US and it's getting worse https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-on-the-rise-in-the-u-s https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-... 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-adolescent-suicide https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/042722-COVID-adolesc... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-soared-during-pandemic-cdc-report-says-n1270463 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...
occamrazor 4y ago
Tweetspam, without even a link to the original thread: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?...
stuaxo 4y ago
UK gov is working to bring us down to the US level.
wilg 4y ago
You might enjoy this post by Matthew Yglesias which explores some of why this might be happening: https://www.slowboring.com/p/tackling-americas-weirdly-short-life https://www.slowboring.com/p/tackling-americas-weirdly-short... Edit: Absolutely love the downvote for this
zem 4y ago
that's okay, the english are working on it!
dhbradshaw 4y ago
Interestingly, within the US people who live on islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico seem to have longer life spans. This is true even taking race and gender into account.
react_burger38 4y ago
Comparing the whole of the United States to England isn't as informative as one would think, given the wide variety of racial and cultural groups in the United States. 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-tragedy-1416961287 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-riley-the-other-ferguson-... [2] https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizens-age-average-life-expectancy-counties-united-states-america-80 https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizen...
- hn_bs 4y ago
  [flagged]
ur-whale 4y ago
Really not surprised TBH. 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.
Jedd 4y ago
The numbers, and explanations, are both fascinating and despairing. 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?
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  off the top of my head/out of my ass: 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
- zol 4y ago
  As an affluent tech industry Australian living in the US (Bay Area) I’d say there’s very little practical difference in my standard of living here compared to back home. It’s more the poorer parts of society here where the figures quoted in the article apply and that feels just as removed from my life here as it does to you sitting in Australia. The US is a big place.
  - tehf0x 4y ago
    This is what pains me the most about the US. Out of sight and out of mind but these poorer parts of society represent xx millions of fellow humans. If you could have similar standard of living in Australia where the poorer parts of society perhaps have more accessible healthcare and better social safety nets, then why the hell can't we do that in the US!? (I know the answers to that question, but it just makes me sad and angry).
0xDEF 4y ago
As a Danish person I was chocked by the amount of fat people I saw in the US. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Particularly extreme obesity. America is the only country where I see people who can't fit through doors, or people who are so big my entire family could fit in their T-shirt and still have our heads sticking out. 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.
Cyberthal 4y ago
[dead]
xiaodai 4y ago
The average American has one testicle and one boob. What if u take out the 15% black population? The health care for the black community is just horrendous.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sangnoir 4y ago
  If you had read the about halfway into the article, you'd have read that the author has controlled for race, and that black people in the US had an improvement in health outcomes. One group that was hit hard? Working class white people.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Average life expectancy for a man in the US is still higher than a man in Scotland. Doesn't that make all the claims in this series of tweets imply the opposite of what they were trying to prove? Why doesn't the gun ban and the NHS and all that help people in Scotland if it would do so much good here in the US? Lying with statistics is very easy, there is a book about it: https://amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728 https://amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039331...
- locallost 4y ago
  > Average life expectancy for a man in the US is still higher than a man in Scotland 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.
mdmglr 4y ago
What corrective actions can be taken by the average American?
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  Eat less, mostly fresh and home-cooked, avoid sugary drinks, exercise more, avoid toxic materials, drugs, excessive stress, sleep well, don't smoke, have a good circle of friends and family, stay safe :)
steve76 4y ago
[dead]
noelherrick 4y ago
The solution to this is known by everyone, including those who will fain ignorance. Implement universal healthcare (including mental health), regulate guns (insurance, registration, training, buybacks, red flag laws) including banning weapons of war, build public transportation and transition away from car-mandatory living in all but the most rural areas, and push for democratically-controlled unions and worker co-ops. The second tier would be around children, namely we should reinstate the child tax credit, make university free, and provide childcare. We need to have a conversation around maternal mortality as well, because that is too darn high in the US (one theory is that we are too doctor-controlled and they will be more likely to induce or perform a c-section). 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.
- cal85 4y ago
  I happen to generally agree with you on the policies, but comments like this make it much more difficult. It’s intellectually shameful to assert up front that anyone who disagrees with your prescription for society must be just pretending. And then to go on to rant about “psychopaths” and “doom” and “taking our power back”. You contribute nothing here.
  - cal85 4y ago
fithisux 4y ago
It is not an accident. It is a plan.
dustedcodes 4y ago
Obesity. Americans are so obese that they don’t even recognise anymore that they are fat when they are fat. Every time US based tech people come to the UK or Europe for conferences it’s incredibly eye opening what they think is healthy and how they see themselves. Plenty of folks who think they eat and drink healthy and are in a good body condition and all I can see is a big wobbly man with barely any hair on their head drinking diet cokes like water. They think eating Mexican tacos is healthy and eating a big KFC is unhealthy. In comparison to here, we think eating home cooked food is healthy and eating a greasy cheesy Mexican taco is unhealthy fast food and a KFC is just plain disgusting.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  I was with you until the hair on the head part. Do you know of any established link between balding and other factors? Is it more prevalent on either side of the pond?
  - hennell 4y ago
    Stress and poor diet increase hair loss, most visible in the recent increases in Asian baldness rates: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/asia-men-hair-loss-bald-scn-wellness/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/asia-men-hair-loss-bald-sc... 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.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Of course they don’t. They’re relaying first-person anectdotes. Why would specifically that be sourced with statistics?
- 10xDev 4y ago
  I think you’re really overselling the UK here. 26% of adults are obese with child obesity rising. Every high street is also full of every fast food chain one can think of. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03336/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...
Moissanite 4y ago
Anyone in the US (or just anyone really) considering visiting Blackpool to see what is driving this equivalence from our end - don't. 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.
- ianai 4y ago
  Actually, turning cheek and looking away is the opposite of what such parts of society need.
- 2b3a51 4y ago
  The issue is common to other seaside towns in the UK although the figures suggest that Blackpool has a larger concentration of the low cost accommodation you mention.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
I wish there could be a real discussion about this, not just the usual baseball stat geek comparers deflecting. Because in the end, this shows a failure of democracy. If everyone is worser off, is that society still a democracy, even if it has all the rituals and proudly proclaims itself so. And the answer is no. The dead do not care about virtual curves flying high about there miserable corpses. And those still living, have every right to rage against such a system and destroy it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
another_poster 4y ago
The US is difficult to compare with other developed countries because it essentially has (1) affluent core regions and (2) poor peripheral regions. The US is essentially bimodal. 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.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  This is true, but it's more fractal than that. You go to the most affluent, in your words "core" region like San Francisco, and you still find it to be bimodal: high wealth, high education, clean and tidy on one side, and medieval conditions just two streets away. Also, I suspect general health levels are lower even in the affluent parts compared to the rest of the developed world due to wide-spread obesity.
- srge 4y ago
  I see why it’s more confortable to see it your way. But somehow it seems to prove the point of the OP: individualism. Even if one sees the US as two different countries cohabitating, this data forces to consider the US as a whole, and maybe it’s healthy as a country.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Oh I’m sure you could find a (1) high-income workers and higher (wink wink) and (2) the unwashed, hinterland masses comparison between countries if you wanted. But then one asks what kind of point you would be proving with that.
roryisok 4y ago
I had to click through to find what the worst part of England was, and ended up on an FT article about Blackpool and the causes of and reasons behind its decline. Very sad but very interesting.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

325 points by grecy 4y ago

Christ Jesus, the USA are on average as good as Merthyr Tydfil, the epicenter of Welsh coal mining, which Maggie Thatcher destroyed. It's bad, but no one anticipated it to be that bad.

suprjami 4y ago
I'm not surprised at all. If you compare individual US states to other countries, some parts of the US south have worse healthcare systems than third-world nations. The US is by far the worst health country in the OECD.
- slaw 4y ago
  At the same time US government spends the most in the world on socialized healthcare.
  - mhoad 4y ago
    Of course they do. Just look at how that entire system is set up. It’s very clearly a for profit driven industry first and foremost and a healthcare system in a very distant second place.
  - paxys 4y ago
    The US government spends the most in the world on subsidizing corporations for healthcare. There is nothing "socialized" about it. The public in general gets very little of that benefit. And that holds true even if you include Medicare.
    - slaw 4y ago
      I meant only Medicare and Medicaid. The US government spends on Medicare and Medicare more then any other country on healthcare.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Don't forget the VA, but this stat always shocks people. I don't think people's brains can even hold on to it. It's important to use italics: The US government spends more on healthcare per capita than all socialized systems. The difference between life and death in the US isn't about paying lower taxes, it's purely rent-seeking; i.e. we pay once for healthcare, and we pay once again to the landlords of healthcare, directly out of our pockets.
      - rolenthedeep 4y ago
        That's really only because healthcare is so absolutely insanely more expensive here. You'd have to normalize those numbers. It doesn't mean the same thing if the US spends a billion dollars on 1 million procedures when a more civilized society can do those same million procedures for 300 million.
      - klooney 4y ago
        Between Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, there are more Americans with socialized healthcare than Britons in the NHS.
        HarryHirsch 4y ago
        Also - Medicare is for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and indigent, and the VA for current and former servicemen, neither of the three groups are good risks. You'd expect higher than average costs even in a well-run system.
        TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        There are also hundreds of thousands more Americans going bankrupt from healthcare costs. If Medi-* actually worked properly that wouldn't be happening.
      - 4y ago
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I don't think it's really about healthcare. It's about everything else in life, that makes people obese or driven into a life of drugs (meth, etc.). Healthcare doesn't really save you from that.
  - 11101010001100 4y ago
    If you choose to look at drugs from a healthcare perspective, you'll find countries that have had some success....
  - IAmGraydon 4y ago
    It's not so much about the quality of healthcare as it is the price.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      You could have the best hospital for free — if you are sedentary, eat poorly, and engage in risky behavior, you will die sooner.
shams93 4y ago
Its actually worse, imagine all that with no social safety net, no functioning medical system. Here our medical and educational systems are so destroyed that not even the wealthy have a good outcome, wealth just enables their kids to get into addiction earlier than poor kids.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Yeah, well, as long as I can sling code for 100K+ a year in this fine country, it’s not my problem what happens thousands of miles away over in Mississippi. —HN
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Live fast, die young. What's the issue?
- fullshark 4y ago
  Why don't they just e̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶k̶e̶ learn to code?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  Do you understand the irony of saying this when we're literally on a thread discussing and caring about the problem that is obviously more affecting the demographics that are non-HN'ers?
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    No. I don’t understand the love people have for molesting the word “irony”. 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.
- selimthegrim 4y ago

version_five 4y ago

No doubt there's a real underlying problem here. The abuse of comparison doesn't help anything though. I'd guess (but it's a guess) that average american life expectancy is going down because of some demographics who have it really bad (opioid users eg). That's an acute problem that has no meaning when averaged with everything else. Quoting averages makes it seem like there's some sort of broad malaise as opposed to specific issues for specific groups.

roundandround 4y ago
I think the Oxycontin/Purdue scam is pretty typical of how corruptions that were once targeted by the government to intentionally victimize minorities in ways not large enough to wash away other gains in overall life expectancy have spread to a difficulty in limiting industries victimizing larger more diverse groups in ways that undermine the stats the US was protecting.
Clubber 4y ago
Also, we have really expensive healthcare, so preventative medicine and recovery type treatment is not done nearly as much as other countries I suspect. You'd think something would change after the massive cracks in the system revealed to everybody by COVID, but it didn't.
zhivota 4y ago
If you have read the article you know it talks about how comparisons across income percentiles yield reductions in US life expectancy across every income level. It's not an isolated issue.

legitster 4y ago

"1 in 25 Americans being born will not make it to their 40th birthday." 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.

jjevanoorschot 4y ago
It’s not necessarily recklessness. 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.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I bet phone usage is also a factor. 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.
  - draw_down 4y ago
    [dead]
  - asdff 4y ago
    With T9 you could send a text with your one hand in your pocket. Try that with an iPhone...
    - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      Text-to-speech is available on the iPhone, is it not? 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.

signal11 4y ago

I saw this other life-expectancy-related story a a while ago, and there are probably COVID-related reasons, but I’m surprised this hasn’t got more publicity: > 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 https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265 [2] https://www.newsweek.com/china-us-life-expectancy-birth-2021-fact-check-1740991 https://www.newsweek.com/china-us-life-expectancy-birth-2021...

Kalanos 4y ago

blackpool is the jersey shore of england?

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Is Jersey Shore full of bright orange people in cheap "fast fashion" clothing trying to pretend they're on roughly ten times as much money as they really make, who make a big show of ordering "expensive" vodka and flash their platinum credit card around as they chop their 30 quid bag of coke? 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.
- jprd 4y ago
  That was disturbingly on point.
- globalise83 4y ago
  Nice :)
- Kalanos 4y ago
  why, yes
rcarr 4y ago
The british version of the tv show is geordie shore set in Newcastle, but the culture in most northern british coastal towns is the same. Essex however, is probably the most accurate comparison considering it has the pretty much the same culture but its close proximity to London mirrors Jersey’s proximity to New York.

Edd314159 4y ago

Blackpool catching strays on this one

hooverd 4y ago

[flagged]

cpursley 4y ago
At least it many parts of England there's still sidewalks.
- hooverd 4y ago
  You've certainly got a better cycling mode share.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
Can you name an American food that isn't brown? At least in the UK people eat vegetables that don't come from cans. Americans sure do love their bland fatty salty food, though.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago
  The solution to a low quality HN comment is to downvote it, not to return the volley with another low quality comment.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    Hey, those munchies boxes look delicious!
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      It can be hit or miss. Some places just give you loads of chips and naan bread, which is a bit of a con. One near where I used to live had four different types of chicken chaat alone, which is kind of the opposite end of the scale. I guess curry isn't really a thing in the US?

imwithstoopid 4y ago

[flagged]

kristopolous 4y ago
Health is primarily a social enterprise, that's the point Clean water, sewage control, clean air, clean food, safe cities, prohibition on toxic chemicals in the environment, access to good information and appropriate care, disease control - hyper individual personal responsibility finger wagging won't get you anywhere to fixing these things and that's what the "there is no such thing as a society" people do not get because they've trained themselves to call those things socialism. These are the consequences of that pig headed pridefully ignorant ideology

reisse 4y ago

The title here is kind of misleading (need to report @dang, I think?). The tweet talks about healthy life expectancy, which is different from life expectancy overall: > 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)

woobar 4y ago
For comparison, healthy life expectancy in the UK [1] in 2020: 62.8 years. Some of these charts don't make sense. [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesuk/2018to2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

AussieWog93 4y ago

As fucked up as death is, I wonder if a lower life expectancy isn't the worst thing in the world. 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.

robbiep 4y ago
You haven’t understood the article. 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.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I don't think you understand the comment. If the life expectancy drops, there are fewer elderly to care for. If people don't make it to 70, you don't have to care for 70+ year Olds. It is a fair thought experiment to explore. Depending on what your priorities are, it could be optimal for everyone to die before retirement age.
  - imwithstoopid 4y ago
    its not like people are just healthy and then when they hit 70, poof! obese people will have health issues from early adulthood onward healthcare isn't the answer - the doctor says "lose weight", and people ignore it or make excuses and are even more obese at their next checkup
  - wetmore 4y ago
    Sure, but the problem is that there is not enough of a young population to support the older population. So if the life expectancy drops because younger people are dying more, that just makes the inbalance even worse, with the population being even more top heavy.

causality0 4y ago

Overall an excellent and correct thread. However I do have to take issue with his choice to equate comparing diverse and non-diverse areas to "adjusting for race". That is not what that is.

KarlKemp 4y ago

This is incredibly drastic data.

anbende 4y ago
Is it? The difference is in 2-4 year range for most of the chart. Is 2-4 years of life expectancy drastic? I didn't read it as such, but I'm not really sure how to assess how big that difference is, honestly...
- PanopticonMan 4y ago
  2-4y of life expectancy is typically an even greater discrepancy is morbidity. So if you die 3y earlier and are 'morbid'/ have life affecting illness for another 2y - you've basically halved the average enjoyable period of retirement for most people. I'd say that's quite drastic.

pcurve 4y ago

each dot represents metro area representing 100k. I wonder how this would look if you separate the data by race and average weight?

sparker72678 4y ago
The article breaks it down; disparity is consistent across age, race, gender, income…
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Curious how you isolate for race between two separate continents ?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Both USA and UK have a sizeable subpopulations of people of European, African and Asian descent, large enough to have reasonably reliable statistics on them.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      I kinda expect it's just not possible for two main reasons: - 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.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Article? I only see one chart? It doesn't mention anything about race and weight.
  - 4y ago

nicoburns 4y ago

This seems unsurprising given the drastic differences in typical diet and exercise levels, and the availability of healthcare.

michaelt 4y ago
Eh, we Brits are no models of good diet and exercise. According to [1] while Americans have the highest obesity rates among major countries, Brits have the third-highest obesity rates. [1] https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/21/british-people-fat-no-denying-7403863/ https://metro.co.uk/2018/03/21/british-people-fat-no-denying...
- anbende 4y ago
  While that's true, the difference may still be enough to explain the 2-4 year difference in life expectancy that is shown on the chart.
- bob1029 4y ago
  American breakfast cereal is probably a good example of the problem. In the UK, don't you have to buy stuff like Cinnamon Toast Crunch from speciality outlets? I was under the impression much of what passes for breakfast in the US is considered confectionary across the way.
  - Jabbles 4y ago
    Cinnamon Toast Crunch is 30% sugar: https://www.cinnamontoastcrunch.com/products/cinnamon-toast-crunch https://www.cinnamontoastcrunch.com/products/cinnamon-toast-... But something like Frosties, a popular cereal in the UK, is 37%: https://www.kelloggs.co.uk/en_GB/products/frosties.html 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.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      I don't know if it makes much difference, but observe that the British cereal has a red mark for high sugar content on the box. It will be shelved near other cereals with green marks. 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.

EngManagerIsMe 4y ago

We've had decades of systematic removal of protections and healthcare for people. There is zero political interest in improving things (and even when there is some, it's opposed brutally.) 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.

makeitdouble 4y ago

The Financial Times column from where it comes from: https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/error-pages/expired-link?contentId=653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303 https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/error-pages/expired-link?c...

Avshalom 4y ago
here's a twitter thread with a lot more diagrams. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873
fernly 4y ago
Thanks, but the link has "expired".
- apexalpha 4y ago
  Better link: https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303 https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

xjlin0 4y ago

Obesity play a role in this. I wish the study can consider the body weight too.

petschge 4y ago
Sure. But is that a cause or an effect?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Pretty sure dying early doesn't make you fat.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Americans are fatter because their food is toxic and their car centric lifestyle is sedentary and unhealthy
    - localplume 4y ago
      [dead]
  - eightysixfour 4y ago
    I think they meant is it the cause of dying early or an effect of whatever is killing Americans.
  - petschge 4y ago
    That part is easy. But did being fat lead to health problems (that then also kill you), or did health problems lead to being fat (which then also kills you)? 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.
    - nicoburns 4y ago

yeknoda 4y ago

Race/age correction please...

jessaustin 4y ago
You want USA to look worse? If so, by all means, emphasize our racial disparities.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  What's worse is that the article breaks it down by race, gender, income etc etc. Clearly HN user Yeknoda never bothered to read it. Spoiler Alert: The disparity persists across all races, ages, and incomes.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Sure there will be lots of hypotheses for why this is the case. In my experience, though, you can almost ignore longevity and just look at these sociological differences that make the quality of life better for the English: 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.

nabla9 4y ago
In the US rich people can get worse healthcare because doctors have incentive to provide unnecessary operations and medications due to 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/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799922583326720/... drugs, traffic, diet, guns.
roenxi 4y ago
It seems pretty likely that the US healthcare decisions at the federal level are to blame. This data suggests it isn't the access to healthcare that is to blame as much as the governance of the entire system is forcing bad outcomes. The effect here is too widespread to be "pub culture". 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.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y ago

hparadiz 4y ago

America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. A person in South Carolina will have a different life from someone in say Santa Barbara, California.

Gigachad 4y ago
The US life expectancy has taken a nose dive in the last couple of years which other countries have not experienced.
ceejayoz 4y ago
> America is a much larger country with a much larger difference in outcome between different people. Chart us against the entire OECD, then. The results are stark. https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
- hparadiz 4y ago
  All I'm saying is pooling the entire United States into a single data point is fairly useless. We need to know which demographics are the ones bringing down the average the most in order to make moves that will improve this metric the most.
  - srge 4y ago
    It’s not useless because we are comparing countries. By breaking up a country you are basically changing the question to get a more favorable answer. Everybody gets that richer states get better LE.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    But you're governed by one federal government, so this point isn't so relevant. 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.

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nmca 4y ago

It would be quite interesting to see with the x-axis unnormalised and; at the moment the equivalent American percentiles are probably materially richer than their UK counterparts, so the effect is larger than shown in real terms.

nmca 4y ago
Oops, that was the next tweet: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799667942866944?t=rgneng-baGCIdi4fGogYDw&s=19 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799667942866944?...

whakim 4y ago

The original article points out that the primary difference between the US and the UK (as well as other peer countries) is that you're much more likely to die young in the US. A 5-year-old in the United States has a 4% chance of dying before age 40, whereas a 5-year-old in Australia, Austria, Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, or Switzerland has ~1% chance of dying before age 40 (values appear to range from ~0.9% to ~1.25%). This suggests that the US's shorter lifespans aren't primarily caused by poorer healthcare outcomes, but rather social problems like drug overdoses, gun violence, and car accidents.

bilbo0s 4y ago
Woah! 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.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  Youth suicide has always been pretty bad in the US and it's getting worse https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-on-the-rise-in-the-u-s https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/youth-suicide-rates-are-... 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-adolescent-suicide https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/news/042722-COVID-adolesc... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-soared-during-pandemic-cdc-report-says-n1270463 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...

occamrazor 4y ago

Tweetspam, without even a link to the original thread: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?...

stuaxo 4y ago

UK gov is working to bring us down to the US level.

wilg 4y ago

You might enjoy this post by Matthew Yglesias which explores some of why this might be happening: https://www.slowboring.com/p/tackling-americas-weirdly-short-life https://www.slowboring.com/p/tackling-americas-weirdly-short... Edit: Absolutely love the downvote for this

zem 4y ago

that's okay, the english are working on it!

dhbradshaw 4y ago

Interestingly, within the US people who live on islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico seem to have longer life spans. This is true even taking race and gender into account.

react_burger38 4y ago

Comparing the whole of the United States to England isn't as informative as one would think, given the wide variety of racial and cultural groups in the United States. 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-tragedy-1416961287 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-riley-the-other-ferguson-... [2] https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizens-age-average-life-expectancy-counties-united-states-america-80 https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/3/13/21177268/utah-citizen...

hn_bs 4y ago
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ur-whale 4y ago

Really not surprised TBH. 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.

Jedd 4y ago

The numbers, and explanations, are both fascinating and despairing. 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?

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
off the top of my head/out of my ass: 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
zol 4y ago
As an affluent tech industry Australian living in the US (Bay Area) I’d say there’s very little practical difference in my standard of living here compared to back home. It’s more the poorer parts of society here where the figures quoted in the article apply and that feels just as removed from my life here as it does to you sitting in Australia. The US is a big place.
- tehf0x 4y ago
  This is what pains me the most about the US. Out of sight and out of mind but these poorer parts of society represent xx millions of fellow humans. If you could have similar standard of living in Australia where the poorer parts of society perhaps have more accessible healthcare and better social safety nets, then why the hell can't we do that in the US!? (I know the answers to that question, but it just makes me sad and angry).

0xDEF 4y ago

As a Danish person I was chocked by the amount of fat people I saw in the US. 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.

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lordnacho 4y ago
Particularly extreme obesity. America is the only country where I see people who can't fit through doors, or people who are so big my entire family could fit in their T-shirt and still have our heads sticking out. 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.

Cyberthal 4y ago

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xiaodai 4y ago

The average American has one testicle and one boob. What if u take out the 15% black population? The health care for the black community is just horrendous.

deleted 4y ago
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sangnoir 4y ago
If you had read the about halfway into the article, you'd have read that the author has controlled for race, and that black people in the US had an improvement in health outcomes. One group that was hit hard? Working class white people.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Average life expectancy for a man in the US is still higher than a man in Scotland. Doesn't that make all the claims in this series of tweets imply the opposite of what they were trying to prove? Why doesn't the gun ban and the NHS and all that help people in Scotland if it would do so much good here in the US? Lying with statistics is very easy, there is a book about it: https://amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728 https://amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039331...

locallost 4y ago
> Average life expectancy for a man in the US is still higher than a man in Scotland 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.

mdmglr 4y ago

What corrective actions can be taken by the average American?

throw_pm23 4y ago
Eat less, mostly fresh and home-cooked, avoid sugary drinks, exercise more, avoid toxic materials, drugs, excessive stress, sleep well, don't smoke, have a good circle of friends and family, stay safe :)

steve76 4y ago

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noelherrick 4y ago

The solution to this is known by everyone, including those who will fain ignorance. Implement universal healthcare (including mental health), regulate guns (insurance, registration, training, buybacks, red flag laws) including banning weapons of war, build public transportation and transition away from car-mandatory living in all but the most rural areas, and push for democratically-controlled unions and worker co-ops. The second tier would be around children, namely we should reinstate the child tax credit, make university free, and provide childcare. We need to have a conversation around maternal mortality as well, because that is too darn high in the US (one theory is that we are too doctor-controlled and they will be more likely to induce or perform a c-section). 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.

cal85 4y ago
I happen to generally agree with you on the policies, but comments like this make it much more difficult. It’s intellectually shameful to assert up front that anyone who disagrees with your prescription for society must be just pretending. And then to go on to rant about “psychopaths” and “doom” and “taking our power back”. You contribute nothing here.
- cal85 4y ago

fithisux 4y ago

It is not an accident. It is a plan.

dustedcodes 4y ago

Obesity. Americans are so obese that they don’t even recognise anymore that they are fat when they are fat. Every time US based tech people come to the UK or Europe for conferences it’s incredibly eye opening what they think is healthy and how they see themselves. Plenty of folks who think they eat and drink healthy and are in a good body condition and all I can see is a big wobbly man with barely any hair on their head drinking diet cokes like water. They think eating Mexican tacos is healthy and eating a big KFC is unhealthy. In comparison to here, we think eating home cooked food is healthy and eating a greasy cheesy Mexican taco is unhealthy fast food and a KFC is just plain disgusting.

throw_pm23 4y ago
I was with you until the hair on the head part. Do you know of any established link between balding and other factors? Is it more prevalent on either side of the pond?
- hennell 4y ago
  Stress and poor diet increase hair loss, most visible in the recent increases in Asian baldness rates: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/asia-men-hair-loss-bald-scn-wellness/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/asia-men-hair-loss-bald-sc... 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.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Of course they don’t. They’re relaying first-person anectdotes. Why would specifically that be sourced with statistics?
10xDev 4y ago
I think you’re really overselling the UK here. 26% of adults are obese with child obesity rising. Every high street is also full of every fast food chain one can think of. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03336/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...

Moissanite 4y ago

Anyone in the US (or just anyone really) considering visiting Blackpool to see what is driving this equivalence from our end - don't. 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.

ianai 4y ago
Actually, turning cheek and looking away is the opposite of what such parts of society need.
2b3a51 4y ago
The issue is common to other seaside towns in the UK although the figures suggest that Blackpool has a larger concentration of the low cost accommodation you mention.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

I wish there could be a real discussion about this, not just the usual baseball stat geek comparers deflecting. Because in the end, this shows a failure of democracy. If everyone is worser off, is that society still a democracy, even if it has all the rituals and proudly proclaims itself so. And the answer is no. The dead do not care about virtual curves flying high about there miserable corpses. And those still living, have every right to rage against such a system and destroy it.

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another_poster 4y ago

The US is difficult to compare with other developed countries because it essentially has (1) affluent core regions and (2) poor peripheral regions. The US is essentially bimodal. 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.

throw_pm23 4y ago
This is true, but it's more fractal than that. You go to the most affluent, in your words "core" region like San Francisco, and you still find it to be bimodal: high wealth, high education, clean and tidy on one side, and medieval conditions just two streets away. Also, I suspect general health levels are lower even in the affluent parts compared to the rest of the developed world due to wide-spread obesity.
srge 4y ago
I see why it’s more confortable to see it your way. But somehow it seems to prove the point of the OP: individualism. Even if one sees the US as two different countries cohabitating, this data forces to consider the US as a whole, and maybe it’s healthy as a country.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Oh I’m sure you could find a (1) high-income workers and higher (wink wink) and (2) the unwashed, hinterland masses comparison between countries if you wanted. But then one asks what kind of point you would be proving with that.

roryisok 4y ago

I had to click through to find what the worst part of England was, and ended up on an FT article about Blackpool and the causes of and reasons behind its decline. Very sad but very interesting.

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