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Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

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Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#51

Post by throwaway290 »

andrepd wrote: post #38
lrvick wrote: post #24

Fast 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.

> Fast 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 Every one of those points is also true in Europe (apart from possibly healthcare), unfortunately. Car dependency and car-centric development is almost everywhere, places like the Netherlands are an outlier. Fast…

Never been to US but saying car centric development in Europe is similar to US sounds crazy to me. It's not just Netherlands. Vienna, Budapest, Stockholm, Barcelona, Germany and Switzerland... is it really true people in America take buses and trains as often as in those places? and they are also so well maintained? is it just propaganda that public transport in US sucks outside of maybe NYC

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#53

Post by fredley »

andrepd wrote: post #43
fredley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the universal healthcare enables access to healthcare to more people. When healthcare is something being paid for by everyone, the state of other people's health matters to you too (not just your own). Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes m…

Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens. The true issue is secondhand smoke . That for me is what it all is about: preventing unwilling people from being exposed to smoke, full stop. About as many people die from smoking than from secondhand smoke. Think for a minute how horrifying that is.

> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.

This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-smoking-t...

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#54

Post by fluidcruft »

potato3732842 wrote: post #45

Comically, 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.…

Do Europeans migrate to a similar extent that Americans do?

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#55

Post by modo_mario »

CalRobert wrote: post #22
pm90 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While 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.

I 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.

And 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.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#56

Post by potato3732842 »

hopelite wrote: post #23

What 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 suf…

It's not europeans making these maps. It's Americans trying to mislead other Americans by playing fast and loose with stats.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#57

Post by jedimastert »

diggan wrote: post #14
pm90 wrote: post #7

I 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?

> I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? Sometimes my wife convince me to try American candy/foods that we buy in these "foreign foods stores" locally, because she grew up eating some of them in her country. And every time we check the contents by reading the nutrition-labels or checking with apps like Yuka, it turns out that the stuff Americans put in the…

The US ranks 3rd in quality and safety, with scores pretty similar to pretty much every European country

https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#58

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

pm90 wrote: post #7

I 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?

I doubt you can free healthcare your way out of obesity. You can't even healthcare your way out of obesity when you make it really, really personally expensive to be obese. And obesity is almost certainly the mortality bottleneck these days.

Obesity is primarily caused by the 1-2000 micro-decisions we make each year about what to eat, when, and how much. A free visit to the doctor now and then is just not going to move the needle much on that one way or another for most people, most of the time. Even if it could we have to ask why a $0 doctor visit would be so much more effective than a $100 doctor visit.

No, the effects you're seeing what Europeans are more fit than Americans on average is coming from somewhere else. I think the real answer is the obvious one: Food here in Europe is simply worse tasting than in the US in general. I've been here for 5 years across twice as many countries; I've never had a pizza here that even matches Little Caesar's back at home, in terms of lighting up my little monkey neurons, to say nothing of Costco. If I ever go back home I will break and get one of the two within a week of reaching the airport.

Capitalism is an optimization process that has optimized the heck out of food reward signal. Your only real options are either to be poor enough that capitalism doesn't care about getting you the 'good stuff' - easier said than done when being poor sucks, and when the good stuff is constantly getting cheaper over time anyway - or you fight back with even harder optimization in the reverse direction. You could argue Europe is some mixture of both compared to the US.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#59

Post by potato3732842 »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #48
hopelite wrote: post #23

What 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 suf…

> 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.

Because 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.

Re: Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

#60

Post by Archelaos »

keiferski wrote: post #12

Any 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 Portuga…

For 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

And here a 2019 map of household income: 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_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.

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