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Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
- anovikov 1y agoIsn't it simply because of race?
- lgeorget 1y agoBetween USA and western Europe? Is there a difference?
- ben_w 1y agoNot many ancestrally native Americans in Europe, relatively few jews compared to the USA (but more other semetic groups, I don't know if that balances or not), the sub-saharan Africans in Europe had a lot more volunteers and less industrialised human trafficing and are in any case very much more diverse genetically than people think due to superficial characteristics like skin colour (seriously, substitute race discussion about skin to be about blonde vs brunette to see how silly the groups are), and there's more of Irish in the US than the current population of Ireland. Probably loads of other differences too.
- pm90 1y agoWhile genetics might play a small role for very specific reasons (eg a society thats prone to sickle cell disease will likely live shorter), there’s no such difference in large, diversified populations like US/Europe.
- CalRobert 1y agoI guess pale people and/or bald people could die younger due to skin cancer? I know I need to be really careful since losing my hair.
- modo_mario 1y agoAnd most of the US gets a lot more sun exposure than most of europe. Also African americans...Well just black people in this context are more than twice as likely to get prostate cancer (more like 3 times given lower detection i've heard it said) supposedly because they have higher testosterone.
- viraptor 1y agoYou'd really need to say what you mean by that. Otherwise just throwing it out like that sure seems like a dogwhistle.
- bboozzoo 1y agoDid you mean a race towards the end of one's life?
- davedx 1y agoSpot the "democratic socialist" countries.
- agubelu 1y agoThe countries with strong social-democratic parties are not the ones you think they are.
- surgical_fire 1y agoYou mean social democracy? Those are basically all in yellow on that map.
- diggan 1y agoThe country I'm from and the country I'm living in right now are both "democratic socialist", has been called "socialist hellhole" by more people than I can count, and they both sit at +4.0 and +4.4. So I guess the positive ones are the "democratic socialist" countries?
- keiferski 1y agoSwitzerland appears to have the highest of them all, and certainly isn’t socialist, although it’s definitely democratic.
- CalRobert 1y agoHow is its safety net? My Swiss colleagues say there’s decent support re: housing, etc
- eertami 1y agoSure it isn't a socialist country, but many Swiss policies would be considered socialist in US politics, eg: if you are sick/ill you receive 80% of your salary for 720 days.
- dobladov 1y agoSan Marino has a +6.4
- pm90 1y agoI get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?
- mog_dev 1y agoFood, I believe it's obvious. France obesity rate is also lower than the US. Large portion of americans eat like they have free healthcare.
- greybox 1y agoThis has got to be a massive factor. What shocked me about the US when I went, was how much peptobismol people chugged down. There was not one meal in my 1 week stay there that I could digest without issue.
- sokoloff 1y agoAnnual sales of Pepto Bismol look to be well under $0.50 per person, so while the American diet and food quality is appallingly worse than Europe, I suspect your one week of stomach upset is not be a great source from which to extrapolate.
- greybox 1y agoFair enough, maybe it was just the amount and variety of peptobismol products that I noticed were for sale everywhere. For example just in the Hotel where I was staying, they had a bunch chewable peptobismol gummy bears + the ordinary bottles for sale.
- 1659447091 1y ago> maybe it was just the amount and variety of peptobismol products that I noticed were for sale everywhere. Just wait until you see the breakfast cereal aisle
- thenoblesunfish 1y agoLet's all go to San Marino! I think the proximal answers for "why" are in the World Health Report, which tells you why people die.https://www.who.int/data/gho/publications/world-health-statistics https://www.who.int/data/gho/publications/world-health-stati... Some of those you'd assume are to do with health care in general, but some (alcohol and tobacco consumption) are more like direct causes in and of themselves.
- octo888 1y ago> Let's all go to San Marino! Probably best not to go all at once. ChatGPT estimates the shoulder-to-shoulder standing capacity of San Marino is only 244 million people!
- keiferski 1y agoAny analysis like this that doesn’t factor in the East needing to catch up after 50 years of communist policies is misleading. I would be curious to see the improvement rate in say, Poland and Croatia over the last twenty years factored in and projected into the next two decades. Especially if we include economic success; Poland for example is probably going to be more economically successful than places like Portugal, if it isn’t already.
- viraptor 1y agoYou can really see when things changed - newborn life expectancy in Poland https://obserwatorgospodarczy.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Przecietne-trwanie-zycia-noworodka-w-latach-1960%E2%80%932021-w-Polsce.png https://obserwatorgospodarczy.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/...
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoThis. This picture only looks at current boomers which heavily favors those in western Europe who live like kings due to wealth, taxation and policies being catered towards them since they make a majority of the voters and caught the good times of economic growth and wealth building, but some of those economies kinda stagnated post 2008, which will mostly affect future generations of retirees not the current ones. So I expect the picture of future retirees will look very different between countries with growing economies and the ones with declining/stagnating economies.
- Archelaos 1y agoFor Germany, it is instructive to compare detailled maps of life expectancy vs. household income. Both seem to be very much correlated. A clear East vs. West and to a lesser extent North vs. South difference is obvious. In Western Germany, most region with very low life expectancy are those regions that were under strong economic pressure in recent decades (usually former mining areas, such as the Ruhr Area and the Saarland). Here is a 2020 map of life expectancy: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/media/13419_main.png https://www.demogr.mpg.de/media/13419_main.png And here a 2019 map of household income: https://www.wsi.de/de/einkommen-14582-einkommen-im-regionalen-vergleich-40420.htm https://www.wsi.de/de/einkommen-14582-einkommen-im-regionale... Differences is smoking might also have an important impact. Here is a 2013 map: https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/FI/LE/_f/47/FILE_f4790b165504a68e4e30cdad02e9955b/die-deutschen-rauche-47183863-jpg-100-1280xauto.jpg https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/FI/LE/_f/47/FILE_f4790b165... This seems to imply an even closer correlation. Of course, correlation does not imply direct causation. The underlying causalities might be various, complex and different from region to region.
- hopelite 1y agoWhat typical Reddit ignorance that compares the avg life expectancy of the whole USA with a range of 68 years for tribal people to 85 years for “Asians”, a 17 year spread, to individual European countries. It has always baffled me a bit that Europeans keep making this basic type error, by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA that suffers from a whole host of benefits of diversity. Europeans simply have no understanding of the real America beyond what they see in movies or hear on Reddit. How could they, most people in America don’t even have a clue what America really is like due to endless barrages of propaganda from childhood on.
- viraptor 1y ago> by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently The first one doesn't include a few European countries. The second is completely backwards - health generally has been on the way up across the board for decades.
- johnisgood 1y agoWhat secret America are you referring to? Could you shed us some light on it?
- speedgoose 1y agoIf you are allowed to pick your samples, Corsican women are doing well in terms of life expectancy.
- JohnKemeny 1y ago> comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA Isn't USA a country? How is a country-by-country comparison "typical Reddit ignorance"? I'm gonna use my typical Reddit ignorance to guess you are indeed from the USA.
- potato3732842 1y agoBecause each state in the US has it's own flavor of regulation (and culture) impacting most of the factors that affect life expectancy most greatly. Your access to booze, cigs and healthcare is very different in NM than it is in MA.
- lrvick 1y agoFast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture so I am only surprised the spread is not worse. This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- marcandre 1y agoEuropeans smoke more than Americans
- throwaway290 1y agoFact. However the top smokers like Serbia also score lower on life expectancy
- magicalhippo 1y agoDepends on country I think. At least here in Norway, after the ban on smoking indoors at public places like restaurants and bars 20 years ago, smoking went way down. When I visited New York a few years ago I was shocked about how much smoking there was everywhere. Of course, people didn't quit nicotine entirely, many moving to snus[1] instead. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus
- pseudocomposer 1y agoI was shocked at the amount of smoking I saw in Copenhagen 3 years ago. And I live in Durham, North Carolina, a historically tobacco city, whose nickname (Bull Durham or the Bull City) literally comes from old tobacco ads.
- magicalhippo 1y agoYea, then again Danes have been quite liberal with alcohol and such in comparison with Norway, perhaps a common theme there. But yes, varies greatly between countries. Since it's "only" been 20 years since the ban here, I'm curious to see if the numbers diverge more in the coming decades, or not.
- potato3732842 1y agoComically, this is also basically a map of countries in Europe scored based on how convenient the existence of each country is to the kind of people who make us-europe comparisons Take the absolute value and the numbers and you get an ok map of how likely someone is to be trying to mislead you if they're comparing all of the US to just this one nation. You could make a pretty similar map with US states vs US average. Correlation is a hell of a drug[1]. [1] https://m.xkcd.com/1138/ https://m.xkcd.com/1138/
- fluidcruft 1y agoDo Europeans migrate to a similar extent that Americans do?
- Jensson 1y agoWhy don't you include Mexico when you compare America to Europe? Are you trying to mislead someone? The parts of Europe that weren't a part of Soviet overwhelmingly have better life expectancy than USA. Including the ex-soviet/communist states is like adding Mexico to US statistics. Edit: Map of the soviet blocks, you can see it very closely correlates with this life expectancy map. When people compare Europe to USA, they compare western Europe, the soviet block states are not relevant in the comparison. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Europe-blocs-49-89x4.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Europe-b...
- _zagj 1y agoConsidering the obesity rate, isn't this impressive?
- GlibMonkeyDeath 1y agoThis effect has been well studied, adjusting for wealth and ethnicity (e.g. black and white American vs. European, adjusting for poverty level here https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104684118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104684118), or just 1-5% highest income Americans vs. European (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7770612/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7770612/.) In 1990, there was no difference in life expectancy between wealthy white Americans and comparably wealthy Europeans (Fig 3 in the first link) Since then a gap has opened up among all levels of income (even the wealthiest white Americans now have lower life expectancy than comparably wealthy Europeans.) The second link looks at the biggest death causes (heart disease and cancer being #1 and #2) and conclude Americans have worse outcomes for both of these conditions. Basically, Europe continued to improve while America stagnated in life expectancy over this time. Interestingly, even in 1990, comparably poor Europeans had longer life expectancy than white Americans. So this isn't exactly new, but it seems all of American life expectancy has been stagnating, and wealth can only mitigate this to a certain degree.
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- insane_dreamer 1y agoUS on par with Albania. Nice. The US can claim "#1" status in 3 areas only: - a large number of top-class research universities (other countries have these two but in much much smaller number) - the most dominant military-industrial complex - deregulated pro-business environment that is a good place to make a fortune if you're talented & lucky, or know how to bullshit investors
- amai 1y agoAmerican billionaires have a very high life expectancy.