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

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

#101

Post by carlmr »

auggierose wrote: post #100
legitster wrote: post #4

"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…

Drivers in the US just seem incredibly aggressive to me. I remember crossing some street in downtown Pittsburgh, and a car coming towards me. The guy was clearly seeing me, and accelerating instead of slowing down. I jumped forwards and survived.

I find American drivers are chill compared to Germans.

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

#102

Post by jpeter »

legitster wrote: post #4

"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…

I guess driving fatalities are up because of texting and driving.

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

#103

Post by woobar »

reisse wrote: post #24

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)

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/healthan...

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

#104

Post by Swizec »

nicoburns wrote: post #90
petschge wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would suggest that poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle lead to both people being fat and to health issues. FWIW, it's been a common pattern for friends of mine who visit the US for even short periods of say 2 weeks to put on small but noticable amounts of weight.

> visit the US for even short periods of say 2 weeks to put on small but noticable amounts of weight

As a European who lives in USA and visits back frequently: can confirm.

In Europe I fight to keep weight on, in USA I fight to keep weight off. Despite counting calories, working out like a maniac[1], and predominantly eating clean. Pre-packaged highly processed foods are like a 1x/month thing, takeout happens max 2x/week, and eating out once or twice per week.

And yet, USA wants to make me fat while EU feels like I can barely eat enough to maintain weight.

[1] my usual week is 7 workouts split between cardio and hiit. Right now I'm in marathon training so going to hit 107km of running this week.

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

#105

Post by nabla9 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #70

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…

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/... drugs, traffic, diet, guns.

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

#106

Post by auggierose »

carlmr wrote: post #101
auggierose wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers in the US just seem incredibly aggressive to me. I remember crossing some street in downtown Pittsburgh, and a car coming towards me. The guy was clearly seeing me, and accelerating instead of slowing down. I jumped forwards and survived.

I find American drivers are chill compared to Germans.

I haven't been nearly killed by a German driver yet, and on purpose, and German drivers had many more opportunities to do so than American ones. But yeah, my impressions are of course only anecdotal, but then again, 100% verified from my perspective.

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

#107

Post by thevagrant »

sammalloy wrote: post #26
Swenrekcah wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are getting so big that people can’t drive them. An indescribably sad statistic: In the US, a parent drives over and kills their kid in the driveway every other day [1]. All the guns also cause -a bunch of— some small kids to kill their siblings every year. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna52109

> Cars are getting so big that people can’t drive them. While controversial because car companies in the US intentionally chose to market large SUVs to the public, there is some evidence that smaller vehicles are safer and that auto manufacturers have doubled down on unsafe vehicles. Why this is the case, isn’t exactly known, but one of the theories is that bad drivers will get behind bigger cars and take more risks.…

I've noticed that certain types of large vehicles attract drivers (or create false confidence) in bad driving and aggressive driving habits.

It is appears that the driver of the large SUV or pickup believes they have right of way over smaller cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

A "get out of my way" attitude.

I love small cars, not to mention cycling and walking.

It concerns me that the shift of cars parked at the parking lot has dramatically changed over the past 20 years.

Walking from the car to the shop is like carpark gauntlet, you need to be increasingly ready to dodge giant vehicles reversing with disregard to their surroundings.

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

#108

Post by tshaddox »

paganel wrote: post #33
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus, modern US trucks are as big (if not as heavy) as WW2 tanks. Photos taken from the infamous DailyMail, but they look correct to me, that is [1] and [2] [1] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45875073-9823577-... [2] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45876985-9823577-...

> if not as heavy

A difference in mass of around 15x, I believe.

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

#110

Post by jprd »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #54
Kalanos wrote: post #11

blackpool is the jersey shore of england?

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…

That was disturbingly on point.
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