Tag Archives: life expectancy

Our World in Data Global Health Explorer

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Our World in Data has a new Global Health Explorer. I’m going to pick a few metrics and see where the United States stands according to a somewhat random set of peer countries. I think it would be interesting to see where we stand as a percentile among OECD and non-OECD countries, but that would require work.

Peer countries: I’m going to pick six highly developed countries and six middle income countries: Canada, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia.

I’m going to pick 10 metrics.

  • Life expectancy at birth: We’re #4! (Japan, Canada, Germany, US, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia)
  • Child mortality: We’re #4! (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Maternal mortality: We’re #4: (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Homicide rate: We’re #6! (Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, US, Brazil)
  • Deaths from road injuries (rate): We’re #4! (Germany, Japan, Canada, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia)
  • Suicide rate: We’re #6! (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, US, Japan)
  • Death rate from all infectious diseases: We’re #2! (Canada, United States, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan)
  • Death rate from alcohol use: We’re #5! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, US, Brazil, Germany)
  • Death rate from drug use: We’re #7! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, US)
  • Death rate from cardiovascular disease: We’re #6! (Brazil, Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, United States, Germany)

There’s a lot more to glean from the graphs in terms of how much separates countries in these metrics, and of course there are many more metric and many more countries. But one thing is clear, USA USA! is not #1. And in this peer group of highly developed countries (Canada, Germany, Japan), we are not even average, we are dead last on most metrics. Asian countries tend to beat western countries on metrics related to life style, such as alcohol and drug use, and are significantly less violent. Germans are no saints when it comes to healthy life style – they drink a lot and have a lot of heart attacks. And Brazil is downright violent.

U.S. life expectancy down

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From a not-yet-peer-reviewed study:

An April 2022 study conducted by researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Colorado Boulder, and the Urban Institute, analyzed provisional government statistics that showed that overall U.S. life expectancy is now 76.6 years — the lowest figure in 25 years.

This drop comes after life expectancy plummeted from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020, according to the researchers. The net loss of 2.26 years was the biggest one year fall since at least World War II, NPR reported…

It noted that even though the Black and Latino populations had bigger drops in life expectancy in 2020, this did not continue into 2021. Life expectancy among Latinos did not change significantly in 2021, and marginally went up in the Black population. In contrast, the life expectancy of white people, mostly men, declined slightly.

Snopes

We have heard about “deaths of despair” – suicide, drugs and alcohol – increasing among white men, so maybe this was the indirect effects of the pandemic coming home to roost.

Trends in life expectancy are a useful metric because they are a pretty objective measure of overall human wellbeing in society – encompassing some mix of physical and mental health, work life balance, child welfare, nutrition, environmental conditions like air quality, car accidents and other accidental deaths, etc. But individual life span is a very personal thing, as I try to convince my parents in their 70s. The fact that you are close to or over the average means you have already survived many things that are causing some people to die young and pull down the average.

another way to look at slipping U.S. life expectancy

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Just in case we need another metric to believe that the U.S. is slipping behind its peers, there is this new study from Lancet, summarized in a Quartz article:

…if the US had a life expectancy equal to the average of countries of comparable wealth (in the study, the group is identified as G7 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and US), its population would be nearly half a million more.

It’s not a new phenomenon. The US has trailed the rest of the advanced world in life expectancy since the 1980s, and it’s now 3.4 years shorter than the average of other G7 countries in 2018, the last year for which international data is available. On average, in 2018, people in G7 countries had a life expectancy of 81.9 years, while in the US (prior to Covid-19) it was 78.5 years. In 2018 in Japan, the G7 country with the highest life expectancy, it was 84.2 years.

Quartz

Note that the average we are comparing the U.S. to presumably includes the U.S., so the gap between the U.S. and its peers would be even slightly worse if we were just comparing the U.S. to the average of its peers. Japanese people are living 5-6 years longer than us, on average. This is before Covid-19, of course. Checking Our World in Data, Japan has a reported death rate from Covid-19 of about 55 per million population, and the U.S. of about 1,500 per million population! (I don’t use exclamation points lightly on this blog.)

the numbers on maternal mortality

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The site Our World in Data likes to plot various statistics against GDP per capita. The U.S. is almost always below the middle, and sometimes towards the bottom, of the industrialized countries. On maternal mortality, the U.S. is orders of magnitude safer than many poor countries, but like other stats there is a noticeable gap with the leaders in our peer group (Finland, Iceland, France, Japan, Switzerland to name a few). Greece and Poland stand out as middle income countries that do much better than us. Interestingly, Belarus also stands out as a high-performance, lower-income country on this metric. The plot is animated, so you can see the U.S. drifting slightly worse over time even as our wealth grows, and even as other countries tend to make progress over time. I think I’ve said it before – we’re coasting on fumes, drifting behind the middle of the pack, and continuing to lose momentum.