Wednesday, December 27, 2006

DOES THE USA HAVE A LOW LIFE-EXPECTANCY?

The article excerpted below says that it does. I will leave it to demographers to comment more fully on it as I could not with a quick search find the figures upon which it is supposedly based. The article says that it is based on this report and that report says in turn that it is based on this report but I cannot find national life expectancy tables in either. This table, however, may be the one referred to.

There are well-known flaws in studies of this kind, however. For instance, pre-term babies are often delivered live in the USA and some die subsequently. Those deaths feed into the figures and so lower overall life-expectancy. In many other countries, however, such babies would die very soon after birth and would not be recorded as live births -- thus removing the effect of preterm births on their figures. See here.

Other factors to bear in mind are that some countries (such as Communist Cuba) probably "massage" their figures to make themselves look good and that the U.S. population is not homogeneous. Blacks die younger, for instance. So overall figures again tell us little. And American mothers often delay childbearing into their 30s, which unfortunately is associated with higher risk to the babies born (more mongolism, for instance, and mongols die young).

Additionally, trust in United Nations figures is laughably gullible. Anybody who thinks that the U.N. does not have political agendas (almost invariably of a Leftist and anti-American kind) does not know much. Here's the excerpt with the dubious "facts":
"If you had a choice between two countries, one with a few thousand dollars more annual income and the other with a longer life expectancy, which would you go for? The most common way for countries to be ranked is by gross domestic product per person - a measure of economic output. On this gauge, the mighty US tops the list, apart from a few super-rich aberrations such as the tiny state of Luxembourg.

But the relative performance of countries according to life expectancy tells another story. Being born in the richest country doesn't mean you can expect to have the longest life. There are nine countries with a life expectancy at birth of more than 80, but the world's richest and most powerful nation, the US, is not one of them. Life expectancy there is 77.5 years, more than 4.5 years shorter than Japan, which tops the longevity list on 82.2 years (followed by Hong Kong, Iceland, Switzerland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Italy and Israel).
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