I would be more interested to see natural death rates compared. Including homicide and drug overdose just mixes different groups and doesn’t give a good understanding of how possible is long life.
The comparison is seemingly a lot narrower at the top: if you make it to retirement, your life expectancy is comparable to the rest of the west. Doesn't mean the deaths of young people aren't important.
> if you make it to retirement, your life expectancy is comparable to the rest of the west
Figure 1 from the paper clearly shows the USA has the worst for life expectancy at age 65 for both women and men compared to the other wealthy Anglosphere nations.
It's surprising that the issue of premature deaths doesn't resonate more with the general public as opposed to so many other seemingly minor issues with much less of a personal impact. I wonder whether it's due to apathy or a sense that the issue is simply too complex to resolve.
You can see from the conversation in this thread that people invoke "personal responsibility": those dying young are other Americans, and people are happy to think that they personally are making better choices.
My impression as an outsider is that America is the kind of country where a sizeable minority of people believe it is very important they be able to ride a motorbike without a helmet.
Not necessarily because they personally want to ride a motorbike - but as a matter of principle. That government should govern as little as possible, that the fewer laws there are the more freedom people have, and that if you're not harming others the government should get out of your way.
They would say if while riding a motorbike without a helmet you should crash and die that's tragic, but the price of freedom is that sometimes people will make bad decisions.
I don't agree with this personally - but I can understand why American lawmakers would have a bias towards inaction.
There are an infinite number of ways to kill yourself, degrade your health, or commit actions that lower your overall physical or financial fitness.
We can't put bubble wrap around all of it.
We evolved into this harsh physical world. We can be caring and educational and empathetic, but it's our universe to play in for a super short moment so long as we don't fuck it up for other people too.
Yeah my feeling is more that due to practical problems, the idea isn't universally applicable.
A motorbiker who dies in a crash isn't around to tell us he's cool with it, and his distraught family often won't be cool with it. So the "yeah the consequences are fine" voice often won't get heard.
A motorbiker who gets left in a wheelchair might have a change of heart, and sue someone for compensation. Who wouldn't, if millions of dollars are on offer?
Drunk driving endangers other road users and I support it being illegal, but some might say a drunk driver hasn't harmed others until they've actually caused an accident. Once you start adding in statistical harms done to society as a whole, that opens up a big can of worms.
I feel that legalising the supply of all addictive drugs probably wouldn't be good public policy.
However, I'm in favour of beer, porn, gay rights and music with offensive lyrics under the principle that if you're not harming anyone the government should get off your back.
Most "premature death" isn't really random and individuals can eliminate most (not all) of their risk by making the right choices. For instance, choosing not to drink and drive significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the risk of dying in a car crash. Choosing not to be a drug dealer reduces the risk of being shot. Choosing not to be a paraglider reduces the risk of dying in an accident.
Of course some people, for political reasons, want to pretend that such choices don't exist and anybody who thinks they can have any control over their life is delusional. Rejecting such sentiments is the healthy choice.
That's right, American homicide is not stochastic. It is far more likely to happen to a person who is themselves a criminal. Not being a habitual criminal cuts your risk of becoming a homicide victim by an order of magnitude. Suicide has a similar solution: if you're worried that you or someone in your household will kill your/themselves, not owning a gun slashes that risk by a large factor.
You're forgetting the frequent tragedies of mass school shootings that are more or less an entirely American phenomenon and affect innocent people at random.
The knock-on effect of these events in American communities must be horrific. How many victims who survive them directly or who lose their loved ones to them fall into deaths by despair or go on to live severely blunted lives that cause them to act out in ways that are detrimental to your society?
That's but a microcosm of the kind of stuff that Americans deal with that people in other countries don't. It isn't normal and it isn't something that your average citizen can just avoid by choosing better.
I am not forgetting about them, but they are demographically irrelevant.
ETA: In the 25 years ending 2022, 122 people died in school shootings. That's 5 people per year. There are ~3000 homicides every year of Americans under age 20.
The number one indicator for crime, almost tautologically, is having previously committed a crime[1]. Keeping violent criminals in jail prevents future crimes, it is fundamentally not the same as just putting a band-aid on a cut. "Avoiding to create criminals" is less important than preventing crimes, as the same small group of offenders is often at fault for the same crime [2].
Also avoiding to import criminals, see Sweden - where I live - for a good example of where that can lead [1]. For the naysayers and label-throwers I can only point at the statistics in the knowledge that these are immune to accusations of racism (et al).
There's also a UN report which lifts up Sweden as an exception to the rule that violent crime is on the wane [2, page 119]: Sweden has experienced unprecedented levels of gang violence and firearm-related deaths in recent years ... Sweden had one of the highest levels of firearm-related deaths in a study over 20 European countries
Telling that taking aspirine won't eliminate the root cause of the pain doesn't imply we know what are the actual root causes, and even less what would heal the person.
Obviously, this is a complexe social topic. To pretend to provide a panacea of all criminality generation all by oneself is asking too much for any individual.
We already have more % population in jail than any other country. Mostly for drugs. The social cost is much less for getting in trouble for drugs in the US, but the incarceration rate is really high.
Which Asian countries would you say are doing better than Finland and Norway?
While Singapore has a lot of things going for it I wouldn't really consider it more free than Norway, even if drug consumption is substantially restricted there.
The US is usually judged against the Scandinavian countries by comparing homicide rates, so use the same to compare Singapore to the Scandinavian countries and you'll see that Singapore does much better.
You could do the comparison using other crimes instead, but bodies are a more concrete metric. By the way, it's not just Singapore.
I found it strange that the article lists gun violence higher than drug abuse or lifestyle choices. Drug overdose deaths are more than 4x higher than gun deaths (excluding suicide).
> Seriously, what do you, the consumer, do with this?
The comment chills me to the bone. Americans truly can not conceptualize themselves as anything _but_ a consumer. I mean, what can I say, other than "Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you."
I had always assume it was generally to do with having the highest obesity rate for English speaking developed countries. It is interesting to see other factors thrown into the equation. I am curious, how relevant is (for example) gun violence as a percentage of tje total number? I also had never considered the healthcare system as a factor.
I kinda think the US model is: We encourage people to come here and get rich by all means. Life is stressful here and ordinary people's life sucks. But if you are rich enough you are getting the best of the world.
So I guess that's why Canadian doctors and nurses fled to the US, get rich and come back to enjoy. I plan to do the same if given the chance.
Response to comments about EU food regulations being healthier:
Probably true in some cases. On the other hand, many of the food regulations in Europe are based off of little more than paranoid pseudoscience. For instance, nearly all irradiated foods are banned in Germany, with only dried herbs and spices exempted. There's no good reason for this.
To make the case that the EUs food regulations are the reason for the lifespan discrepancy you'd at least have to eliminate factors like access to healthcare, violent deaths, drug overdoses, etc.
This is as short sighted a take as the other one. Here in BC we got record deaths from overdoses (>6/day) and we have a pretty left leaning government. The problems are manifold, housing, cost of living, etc.
Media choices are in no small part policy choices—and then media feeds back into policy.
The current media landscape rose from the fall of the fairness doctrine in the 80s, a Chicago-school-driven sharp shift in anti-trust enforcement (initially) via the judiciary starting in the mid ‘70s, and the removal of rules prohibiting concentration of media outlet ownership in the ‘90s and early ‘00s.
It’s downstream of the U.S. being an oligarchy, where all the things that kill people make someone money, who then uses those proceed to buy off politicians and judges and keep the whole vicious cycle going.
America's the most free country on the planet. If someone wants to speed or OD and die, that's their choice. I would rather have that than someone else prescribe what I can and cannot do with my life.
Switzerland has much more real freedom (apart from going properly mental with hundreds of guns 'for personal protection', although strictest US states have far more restrictions than CH).
Frequent public votes on literally any topic you gather 100k signatures including such heavyweight topics like joining EU or NATO, or banning new mosques construction. You will never see such direct democracy in US, and you need very specific educated responsible moral population for it to work long term, or you get Brexit even with otherwise pretty decent and smart British folks.
0 opioid crysis, 0 gun violence, no obesity crisis to speak of, free very good quality public schools (to the point that nobody wants to pay for private schools if its not part of their corporate benefits) all the way up to top notch universities. Cca free absolute top notch medical system. Government that aint so darn clearly in big corporate pockets. They never criminalized drug addicts/consumers. I could go on for a long, long time. A lot of actual serious freedom in each above.
Not bashing US, its a great place for certain people and certain age, but hell would freeze sooner than I would move to US to ie raise kids or grow old. Land of free is mostly just politician's phrase, the bar ain't some dysfunctional 3rd world dictatorship, most of the world lives in pretty decent freedom.
But (most) Drugs, speeding and murder are still forbidden in the US (and carry larger penalties, especially the drugs and violent crimes than in other countries).
Not forbidden. You can still do it, just have to deal with the consequences. There's the difference. Freedom doesn't free one from the consequences of their actions.
That's an odd take, given the USA imprisons more people for longer for doing those things any of the other countries listed. The difference is not small. The USA has 0.5% of their population in jail, Australia 0.15%. The USA has the death penality, Australia doesn't. The USA's drug laws are in practice the most punitive of all the countries listed. So when it comes to OD'ing, the situation appears to be the reverse of what you said: a USA citizens have the least freedoms.
If you read the article you will see the other countries don't achieve the health by restricting freedoms. For example, there isn't a significant difference between Australia's & the USA's laws on speeding. Australia reduced speeding accidents by adding roundabouts. All adults are allowed to smoke in Australia - but it's very expensive. Assisting someone to die in Australia can be legal, it isn't in most of the USA.
These individual freedoms you think you have in the USA are mostly a myth. The rest of the world looks at USA preventing a woman from making an individual choice about abortion and then in the next breath claims the USA is the worlds leader in individual rights, and scratches their head.
> If someone wants to speed or OD and die, that's their choice.
I'd recommend digging into this topic a little bit to find out that it's not as simple as that. It's not that these people partied too hard. Every overdose is a sad story that could have and should have been prevented.
I think it was Franklin who is quoted to have said "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
While I've always resonated personally with this quote and how it relates to what I consider a fundamental principle we should strive to achieve/maintain, I recall there being some debate about the 'etymology' of the quote itself.
at least the car accidents is not very free. most people have to drive for most trips because any other mode of transportation is not really practical for the purpose, and our regulations reinforce this trend; it is the law of the land in most of America that builders must include oversized parking lots for free, which make it harder to get around by walking or public transport or bike. (And when I say oversized, I mean the general minimum amount of parking for stores, for example, is pretty much never filled up even on busy shopping periods like Black Friday.)
