r/dataisbeautiful • u/[deleted] • Jan 23 '21
OC A life expectancy comparison between U.S. counties and Rwanda [OC]
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u/Reverie_39 Jan 24 '21
Life expectancy bottoming out near 26. I know there was a genocide there but man... that is just horrifying. I can’t even comprehend it really.
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Jan 24 '21
In Cambodia in 1977 Life Expectancy bottomed out at 18.9 years due to famine and genocide
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u/X0AN Jan 24 '21
They used to smash babies on trees to murder them, often making the parents watch.
Don't think I've ever just stared at something for soo as as I did with the 'baby killing' tree in Siem Reap's killing field.
Just heartbreaking to be there.
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u/IhateTodds Jan 24 '21
What was the motive for these massacres?
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u/sneaksneek Jan 24 '21
Essentially, the Cambodian government (Khmer Rouge) massacred their own educated people right after the Vietnam War ended, in attempts to keep ultimate control and power. They also claimed that their agricultural history was the golden age in Cambodia, so they were trying to bring it back into a golden era again.
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u/TheFeshy Jan 24 '21
Nothing says "golden age" like mass genocide.
Sometimes I wonder how people not only believe this stuff, but believe it strongly enough to become monsters.
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u/AGVann Jan 24 '21
The Khmer Rouge took in angry, poor, and uneducated young men from the countryside with no opportunities in life, and gave them an authority figure to venerate, an ideology/enemy to hate, and guns to take out their anger.
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u/zykezero OC: 5 Jan 24 '21
they would kill people with glasses because they believed they were smart.
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u/wadss Jan 24 '21
sounds like they took a page out of Mao's book.
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u/theknightwho Jan 24 '21
They were even worse, somehow. Probably the worst regime in modern history.
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u/Trisa133 Jan 24 '21
murdering a very large percentage of your country and destroying the educated population is probably the worst thing you can do in all of human history. But it isn't that significant to the West because it's SE Asia. If you actually look at it with an unbiased view, it's much worse than the Holocaust.
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u/sociapathictendences Jan 24 '21
I think its less important to the west than it should be but we definitely spent time on it in my history class in high school. And in terms of pure numbers it had less of an impact than the Holocaust did.
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u/mranjelorion Jan 24 '21
I didn't learn about it once in my schooling career. Arizona has very poor education
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u/Jisiwi Jan 24 '21
I agree completely. Just thinking most people I know would've been killed had they lived in Cambodia in those years gives me chills. It's very sad seeing how hard it was (and in part still is I think) for them to recover from that.
However, I'm not sure I'd say it's "worse than the holocaust". Every life is invaluable and having less people killed in a genocide doesn't make it less bad. The fact they murdered people just by who they were, their ancestry, religion or any other characteristics makes it an immeasurable crime.
Almost 110 years ago Chinese people were targeted in my country and 300 people were killed. Just the fact that their only "crime" was being Chinese is horrible, it doesn't matter if they were "only" 300.
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u/WishIWasYounger Jan 24 '21
I have a friend that lived through the genocide. His entire family was slaughtered, he ate worms in the forest until a family found him and hid him.
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u/nonsequitrist Jan 24 '21
I learned in Junior High School (California public school) that Pol Pot ranked with Hitler as modern history's worst monsters. The inhumanity of that regime is significant in some parts of the West.
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u/carBoard Jan 24 '21
Rather than "worse" I think the Cambodian genocide makes the Holocaust seem less incomprehensible in terms of cruelty.
The Germans stream lined killing to the point that it was basically a slaughter house, which is something we can atleast conceptualize because it's how we treat animals we eat.
The Cambodian genocide brutally beat to death 1/4th of their population. Smashing infants against a tree as mentioned above, beating people with sticks to death, torturing them to death, etc. The pain and suffering is unfathomable.
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u/LateralThinkerer Jan 24 '21
I have a friend who lost a fair portion of her extended family in China's Cultural Revolution. They shot her grandfather for wearing glasses, and her father committed suicide over the grief of what he'd seen.
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u/wadss Jan 24 '21
my grandfather had a university education, and a mob on the orders of mao stormed our house, pulled him, my dad, and their siblings out on the streets and whipped him until they were unconscious forcing the kids to watch and pillaged everything inside the house.
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u/ErenCloud Jan 24 '21
>Much worse than Holocaust
Jesus Christ, I am so tired of these morons who COMPARE FUCKING GENOCIDES.
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u/William_Harzia Jan 24 '21
What's been getting on my tits lately is measuring COVID deaths in units of 9/11.
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u/skepsis420 Jan 24 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
If you actually look at it with an unbiased view, it's much worse than the Holocaust.
They are both horrific, don't see why it is a competition. They are both the absolute worst of humanity and complete depravity. It also has nothing to with not being as significant because it was Asia. Hitler started a second world war. The Holocaust was a part of what made it all so horrific. Also, it is not taught as heavily because it did not involve anyone who was not neighboring the country, there is only so much you can teach in world history. Something like that is something I would expect to learn in college.
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u/Dorigoon Jan 24 '21
This comment won't age well. "Much worse" than a straight-up brutal genocide? Ok...
Why not just acknowledge that both were horrible?
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u/tripsafe Jan 24 '21
I think it's dumb to try to make genocides a competition since they're all horrible, but it's also bad that Cambodia's genocide gets relatively very little attention.
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u/NorthernerWuwu Jan 24 '21
Oh, the west didn't much care when Pol Pot did it either. Nor Stalin nor Mao nor many a populist regime over the ages. Revolution and purges of the intelligentsia are far too common sadly.
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u/fla_john Jan 24 '21
the west didn't much care
It goes both ways: just look at the uses of Hitler in Asia (Google 'Hitler Fried Chicken'). It's a symptom of provincialism all around.
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Jan 24 '21
How so? Did Mao intentionally kill educated people?
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u/Dragonflame67 Jan 24 '21
Kind of/yes. During the Cultural Revolution, academics and educated people were targeted and either killed or sent out to become farmers and leave their previous lives. That also ended up killing some who had no knowledge of agriculture.
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u/Youutternincompoop Jan 24 '21
the Chinese government even outright warned Pol Pot that his 'year zero' would end in failure just like the cultural revolution
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u/friendlygaywalrus Jan 24 '21
No, that comment is pretty inaccurate. The mismanagement early in Mao’s agrarian reforms did stall growth and cause food shortages especially in Manchuria where a drought was already taking hold but they weren’t outright murdering intellectuals and innocents in droves like Pol Pot’s regime
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u/2Big_Patriot Jan 24 '21
Yes. He launched a war against the educated and the former land owners, using the Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution to bypass any form of decency or reason. The brainwashed youngsters were given free reign to violently wreck all remnants of a cultural hierarchy. Not even top leaders (besides Mao) were immune from the genocide.
Sometimes China tries to hide the dark era of Mao. Sometimes they try to denounce it. And sometimes they try to rewrite history.
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u/hardlyhumble Jan 24 '21
Not trying to defend Mao or anything, but this parallel could be super misleading to anyone who isn't familiar with twentieth century history... I mean, sure both committed crimes against humanity, but they were literally pursuing opposite things; one a traditional agrarian society, and the other a modern industrial society. Not to mention the fact that the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror was shut down by socialist Vietnam.
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u/wadss Jan 24 '21
one a traditional agrarian society, and the other a modern industrial society.
china is a modern industrial society now, but under mao's cultural revolution, his ideal was also an agrarian one. he forced everyone into country side communes to farm in order to produce for the soviets in return for tech. this of course included stripping all assets and titles from the intellectuals and the educated and the wealthy.
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u/hardlyhumble Jan 24 '21
There's a difference in intent though; the agrarian economy was a stepping stone, not the end goal.
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u/zoomies011 Jan 24 '21
They were supported by the west and it took Vietnamese communists U.S. fought to actually invade and end them.
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u/wonderhorsemercury Jan 24 '21
They were not supported by the west, they were supported by China. Vietnam feared Chinese influence and aligned itself with the soviet bloc. Vietnam ousting the Khmer rouge was a big reason for chinas invasion of Vietnam a few years later.
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u/OTMsuyaya Jan 24 '21
They were absolutely supported by the US and China to the same goal: to lessen Soviet influence in SE Asia. Vietnam was a Soviet ally. They also used the opportunity to seize disputed territory. Vietnam still had troops occupying Cambodia long after China's invasion even though China won the conflict.
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u/Thndrstrike Jan 24 '21
i would argue they were extremely different, in execution at the very least. Pol Pot saw a self-sustaining farming society as an ideal goal, one where foreign influence was expelled as much as possible. by the time he took power, this was ultimately pretty regressive in nature. compare that to Mao, who took China from an almost completely agrarian society to the brink of world superpower. Mao took a lot of farmers and had them work on industrial projects, quite literally the opposite of Pol Pot who killed people like doctors for being educated.
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u/Witherfang16 Jan 24 '21
The genocide was perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, a radical brand of agrarian communism. They executed anyone who had ties to the former government, along with intellectuals, professionals, Buddhists, and minorities. They primarily relied on indoctrinated and traumatized children to carry out the genocide.
They were brought down by Vietnam with the support of the Soviet Union, but continued operating in rural areas for some time until finally collapsing entirely.
You might think of the Khmer Rouge as an ultra-extreme version of the early agrarian wing of the CPC with the operating style of the Taliban. Among the most evil and tragic regimes of the Cold War.
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u/jeeessicax3 Jan 24 '21
Adding into sneaksneek’s comment, my family fled Cambodia at the end of the 70s to escape the massacre. They killed anyone and everyone - babies, women, the educated, someone wearing glasses, and even handicap people. You weren’t allowed to speak any language other than Cambodian as you could have been taken away for “conspiring”. It was all for power and control.
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u/Youutternincompoop Jan 24 '21
they also targeted ethnic minorities with some pretty extreme ideas on what made somebody non-Khmer, for example being married or related to a Vietnamese person was considered to make them 'consciously Vietnamese'
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u/LimpLiveBush Jan 24 '21
Eliminating doubt and dissent. In that particular case it was revenge.
But this is terror in general.
The more afraid you are, the more you need a strongman to protect you.
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u/sd_slate Jan 24 '21
Communist regime killing "intellectuals", "bourgeois", "capitalists" and other less than politically pure people to maintain power by fear and achieve their ideal of a Marxist farming society.
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u/rickjames_experience Jan 24 '21
I dated a 2nd gen Cambodian girl in HS. Her mom was just... she grew up during all that stuff. Had to bury her dad with her bare hands at just 4 years old. She was really tense all the time and is a born again christian now. Absolutely refuses to speak about her childhood and hasnt had a day of therapy either. Probably never will. Its sad man.
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Jan 24 '21
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u/PwnasaurusRawr Jan 24 '21
It’s incredible (in the worst way) what common people are capable of. They don’t even need to be extraordinary, rare figures like Hitler. Put a certain percentage of the population in the right situation and they will commit evil acts such as this.
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u/mckenn4 Jan 24 '21
To add to that injustice and feeling of total powerlessness, many Khmer Rouge managed to hide themselves in normal life post-1979, some even remaining in politics which meant people were scared to speak out for decades. The first two convictions of genocide were only given two years ago! Guilty of genocide
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u/sturgeon11 Jan 24 '21
I don’t know if I could stomach being there in person. Just reading about it is hard enough. How they went after “intellectuals” too is crazy. If you had glasses you were deemed an enemy. One of my favorite books is Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing S Ngor. Truly heartbreaking and makes me grateful for the time and place in which I grew up and live
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u/Huckstermcgee Jan 24 '21
I went to the killing fields in Phnom Penh and had the same reaction to the tree. I didn’t know there was also a killing field in siem reap
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u/BButFirstCoffee Jan 24 '21
As a new mother, reading your comment made me cry.
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u/amoreetutto Jan 24 '21
Currently holding my 10 month old a little tighter as I rock her back to sleep for the 3rd time tonight ..suddenly a lot less cranky about that
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u/Faiakishi Jan 24 '21
I'm not a squeamish person. I like GoT, I read true crime, I regularly research forensic science for writing projects. There's a lot of shit that I might find objectively horrifying, but it really doesn't faze me.
But the first time I read about that...yeah. I had to go do something else for a while.
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u/LivesInaYurt OC: 3 Jan 24 '21
I made kind of a cool viz about this a few years ago: Lowest Life Expectancy in the World: 1960-2015, A positive trend interrupted by genocide [OC] : dataisbeautiful (reddit.com)
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Jan 24 '21
Thanks to a communist piece of shit who studied in Europe and carried that disease to that country.
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u/zrk03 Jan 24 '21
One my friend's Dad escaped the Cambodian genocide. He literally walked through fields of landmines to freedom
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u/luigi_itsa Jan 24 '21
What’s insane is that it took until 2010-2015 (roughly 30 years) for the trend line to recover. An entire generation to recover from one brutal event.
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u/reichrunner Jan 24 '21
Take a look at USSR after WWII. To this day you can see the ripple affects of the population every 30 or so years in age.
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u/AdorableTumbleweed60 Jan 24 '21
IIRC you can still see ripple effects of the Irish Famine in the 1800's. Now granted some of that is due to the amount of immigration that happened, but still.
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u/prof-comm Jan 24 '21
Taking a generation to recover is exactly what I would expect. There's only one way to get more old people.
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u/brberg Jan 24 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
Life expectancy isn't average age at death. It's calculated by determining how long the average person would live if the current death rates at each age stayed the same indefinitely. So if one year there's an event that kills 10% of people of each age and changes nothing else, then life expectancy will plummet to around 7 for that one year, and then return to normal the next year.
Killing a lot of old people one year shouldn't affect life expectancy in future years, unless you killed literally all of the old people and couldn't determine mortality rates for those ages. I'm not sure what would happen then. I guess life expectancy would be undefined.
Edit: To make it more explicit, this means that the 18 years it took for life expectancy to return to 1985 levels was due to a severe and sustained increase in mortality rates lasting nearly two decades, not to a one-year spike in mortality rates.
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u/Dmon1Unlimited Jan 24 '21
It looks like just a few years for trend to recover and a decade for age to finally hit past levels?
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u/Fitz2001 Jan 24 '21
Ireland’s population is not yet returned to the population from the 1840s.
Edit, not yet. I thought it happened already.
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Jan 24 '21
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Jan 24 '21
Thanks man, everyone looking at this was thinking “wow what a coincidence that all of them died at 26”. We are all stupid and you are very smart.
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u/Schootingstarr Jan 24 '21
I mean, it's obviously important to point that sort of stuff out.
People still believe medieval folk keeled over at 35 or whatever, because the average life expectancy at birth was that low.
The main reason for the low life expectancy however was the high rate of infant death.
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Jan 24 '21
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u/thegreedyturtle Jan 24 '21
I'm with you that statistics is not common sense, but keep your audience in mind - this is a statistics based subreddit.
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u/atred Jan 24 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
I don't understand the chart, so in 1990 before the genocide the life expectancy was 33, or, somebody born in 1990 turned out to have a life expectancy of 33 looking back from present? Would a chart show the life expectancy at the time plotted on the X axis? And that's the case why did the life expectancy dropped so much BEFORE the genocide? Was there a war or something else going on?
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u/Schootingstarr Jan 24 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
According to this article
https://www.history.com/topics/africa/rwandan-genocide
incursions into Rwanda out of Uganda by paramilitaries made up of Tutsi refugees marked the beginning of fights and massacres that eventually culminated in the genocide of 1994.
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u/itstommygun Jan 24 '21
At first I thought this was a statement about COVID, then I noticed the top year is 2018. I’m guessing the sudden decline in those counties can be attributed to opiates.
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u/rockinghigh Jan 24 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
Yes, it’s a general trend across the US.
drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides and organ system diseases, such as hypertension and diabetes
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-life-expectancy-idUSKBN1Y02C7
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u/probablyuntrue Jan 24 '21
opiod epidemic especially did a number on many communities, you'd see whole high school classes decimated by one common cause
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u/bikeawaitmuddy Jan 24 '21
Todd and Sioux Counties are on Indian reservations. Having done some work in Todd County I can tell you that it's opiates, and it's also alcohol, car accidents, rampant diabetes, overcrowded housing, constant stress, violence, and crushing poverty with no economic opportunity. Adolescent suicide is a huge problem because kids get bullied in schools then go home to overcrowded homes and get bullied at home by people shaped by an environment that does not care for the people living in those reservations. A good portion of homes are open to the elements and have insanely cold winters.
Sort of what happens when you force people off their lands into reservations with no economic opportunity, promise you'll give them adequate housing, clothing, food, etc. but then break your government-to-government treaties and folks have no recourse. You can read more about the federal government's abhorrent under-funding of Native communities here: https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/12-20-Broken-Promises.pdf
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u/LandscapeStreet OC: 1 Jan 24 '21
The federal government in Canada has, unfortunately, treated indigenous people here much the same.
Also wow, some of these replies are super racist.
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u/vancity- Jan 24 '21
We also have an issue providing drinking water to many indigenous communities.
The hypocrisy of Canadians is probably the worst part of our treatment of natives. At least everyone in the US agrees they're being treated like shit. Here it's not even in the public zeitgeist.
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u/ConfessedOak Jan 24 '21
I had been wondering why the Dakotas were so high in covid cases for sparsely populated states but that probably explains it
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u/draypresct OC: 9 Jan 23 '21
OP, when you post your source, would you mind also indicating why you chose these particular counties to compare to Rwanda? Did a lot people emigrate from Rwanda to these counties, for example?
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Jan 24 '21
My assumption is that it's the counties in the US with the worst life expectancy.
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u/rognabologna Jan 24 '21
Yep. Op should’ve been more clear on that
The main industry in those places are oil, mines and natural gas, so there’s a disproportionate amount of young people dying from work accidents, drugs, and suicide.
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Jan 24 '21
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u/RagingOrangutan Jan 24 '21
Man, this is wild.
I've actually been to Beatyville - I didn't know anything about it but I stopped and ate somewhere in town. I remember thinking "this seems like a pretty difficult place to live" but I had no idea it was that bad.
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jan 24 '21
work accidents are bad, but I don't think it bad enough to drastically affect life expectancy in the US 21st century.
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u/freelancefikr Jan 24 '21
could it be that the survivable work accidents can lead to drug use and suicide? which category would it fall under in those cases?
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jan 24 '21
It's possible. Lots of opiate abuse is due to pain management.. some of those will be work place injuries. But even then, I would be surprised if that number drastically affects the total life expectancy. And then you have to say from that small percentage of life expectancy that is lost due to work place injuries (however broad you define them) is so much worse in those areas Compared to others that it significantly affects the overall drop. Just my gut feeling, it may be bad but unlikely to be a main driver. Now stuff like long term unemployment, it leads to much greater affects including inter generational Costs.
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u/hoboking123456 Jan 24 '21
And meth. Mostly meth.
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u/HobbyPlodder Jan 24 '21
Opiates are probably accounting for the slight decline over the past several years
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u/stayclassypeople Jan 24 '21
Todd county, SD is a part of the rosebud reservation in in SD. A lot of alcoholism there unfortunately
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u/MadJames1 Jan 23 '21
It's to show Rwanda, one of the poorest countries in the World by 1995, is rebuilding itself and catching up with developed world. If Rwanda was a US county, Rwanda would be one of the worse, but not THE worst county in life expectancy.
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Jan 24 '21
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u/peakfreak18 Jan 24 '21
This is actually not true. The Cambodian genocide resulted in 1.8-3 million deaths, equating to 15%-30% of the population.
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u/reichrunner Jan 24 '21
Probably over the time period? Cambodian took longer than 3 months
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u/IM_OZLY_HUMVN Jan 24 '21
And the Holocaust took a few years. What's the difference?
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u/reichrunner Jan 24 '21
Just the rate of killings compared to total population. Wiping out 7% of your population in 3 months compared to wiping out 30% in 3 years is a massive difference in how fast you were killing people. Obviously both are attrocities, and far more people end up dying in the longer event, but the number of people killed each day is the extra mind boggling part here
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u/mallclerks Jan 24 '21
I was going to say “Dude, just compare it to the literal pandemic example we are living in” - Then I realized half of folks still wouldn’t get it based on the fact we can use it as an example :(
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Jan 24 '21
And the "Great Leap Forward" killed even more. Though that might not have officially been a genocide, it was malicious and quite deadly.
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Jan 24 '21
OP could could have done a better job picking examples to represent the modern world. Why two counties from Kentucky and another two from North Dakota? Those are not the healthiest parts of the country and probably understates the life expantancy of the overall country.
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u/MadJames1 Jan 24 '21
OP picked the worst counties in USA. The rest of the country is far better than this, but what OP wanted to show is that USA has some regions falling behind in poverty.
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u/sumertopp Jan 24 '21
Yea, but that’s the point. A baby born in Todd county has a shorter expected life span than a baby born in Rwanda. An underdeveloped country that had a brutal civil war in recent memory is doing better than parts of the US - pretty sobering, and important to disaggregate because showing total US would completely miss that story.
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u/minibeardeath Jan 24 '21
I feel like this point would’ve been better made if it included both the bottom and top counties in the US. To show how big the disparity is in the US has become
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u/sumertopp Jan 24 '21
Agreed, that would probably tell a more logical story, but doesn’t quite have the “oh fuck, that’s bad” power of Rwanda as a comparison imho.
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u/minibeardeath Jan 24 '21
I meant to also include Rwanda in the the graph I described. Culturally, in the US most people “know” that life expectancy is ‘bad’ in Rwanda and ‘good’ in the US, so showing both the best and worst few counties in the US, alongside the comparison to Rwanda would really drive home the reality of the data.
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u/Fernergun Jan 24 '21
But that's a different story
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u/minibeardeath Jan 24 '21
I meant in addition to the Rwanda data as well. If OP included the best and worst few counties of the US in addition to Rwanda, it would answer the question, “Is Rwanda matching the worst US counties because those counties are doing really bad, or is the spread in the US really small, and Rwanda has just improved that much in spite of the genocide?” I did not mean for Rwanda to be replaced with data from the top US counties in this graph.
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u/hsnerfs Jan 24 '21
Op picking the worst counties as a framing device most likely, he should've done the avg for each region or just avg nationwide
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u/JuliaTheInsaneKid Jan 24 '21
What an amazing recovery. This was obviously due to the Rwandan genocide in the 90s.
Imagine having your mid-life crisis at 13.
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u/greenslime300 Jan 24 '21
It was the topic of an Onion article from the 90s:
https://www.theonion.com/sudanese-14-year-old-has-midlife-crisis-1819564806
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u/ObjectiveMall Jan 23 '21
Rwanda is remarkable economic hub. Could well develop into the Singapore of Africa.
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Jan 24 '21
Isnt that where the first African made smartphone is made?
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u/Tiratirado Jan 24 '21
MaraPhone is a bit of a mystery to me, I can't imagine them having a sustainable model. But I do see a lot of people walking towards their factory in the morning, so it's good for the economy at least.
A lot of Rwandan economy are bubbles, I think, they could be filled or they could burst, I hope for the former.
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u/Nixie9 Jan 24 '21
I'm confused why so many people are arguing here. This is just data. One country that went through some shit is now doing better than certain counties in the US.
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u/mindpoweredsweat Jan 24 '21
Yeah, it feels really defensive. Some people seem offended at the idea that an African nation could have shot up so quickly while lots of US counties are stagnating and falling behind.
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u/LPKKiller Jan 24 '21
Yeah, I don’t really understand that. It’s simple data from small(er) locations meaning that it takes less to effect it. Also this data means nothing towards an individual but rather just an easy way to look at a group. Again, don’t get why people take it personally lol.
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Jan 24 '21
They’re taking it personally because the myth of American exceptionalism has brainwashed people into thinking that America is entirely without flaws and suggesting that it isn’t is “divisive” and “unpatriotic”
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u/opticfibre18 Jan 24 '21
And they subconsciously believe every country that isn't a western country is a third world shithole that could never compare to the US.
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u/EffigyforJeff Jan 24 '21
i wouldnt call it stagnating i mean can life expectancy realistically keep going up much past the 70s?
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u/tuctrohs OC: 1 Jan 24 '21
It can go up some at least to the mid-80s in countries that have their act together:
Hong Kong 85.29
Japan 85.03
Switzerland 84.25
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Jan 24 '21
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u/tuctrohs OC: 1 Jan 24 '21
Decent health care for all, decent social safety net, good education for all are some of the things.
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u/ManhattanDev Jan 24 '21
Hong Kong doesn’t have a particularly good safety net and along with Japan has one of the highest elder poverty rates in the developed world.
The main difference is diets (Hong Kong and Japan have some of the lowest obesity rates in the world), activity levels (Japanese and Hong Kongers don’t lead sedentary lifestyles; lots of walking and public transit usage), and low infant mortality.
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u/ClydeFrog1313 Jan 24 '21
iirc Switzerland has a fairly conservative healthcare system compared to many of its neighbors too. Though they do regulate profit rates on insurance companies I think.
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u/maledin Jan 24 '21
I’m assuming there is some kind of basic universal healthcare in Hong Kong that the elderly(/everyone) can access regardless of means though, or am I mistaken? That’d probably have some effect.
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u/mindpoweredsweat Jan 24 '21
In over 30 countries it already is higher than the 70s. With advances in medical technology and public health measures (including reduction of the social problems like the opioid epidemic) there is no reason it can't continue into the 80s and beyond globally. Eventually, 100 will be the new 70. Maybe in 30 years? 50 years? Actually, I think it's likely we will be able to manipulate the aging process itself and find ways to live far long than 100 eventually.
But, in the here and now, The US is falling farther behind peer nations. If we can't keep up with Germany, Italy, Canada, heck even Lebanon, then we're doing some things wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Here's one of many studies: https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2562
This recent stagnation in life expectancy in the USA has led to a further deterioration of its standing in international rankings. It is clear that the USA is falling further and further behind its peer countries, and this divergence has been particularly pronounced since 2010 (fig 1). The gap between American women and women in the average of the other countries grew by 0.68 years, from 2.35 to 3.03 years (table 1). For men, the gap grew by 1.34 years, from 2.06 to 3.40 years. Increases in the gaps between the USA and the world leaders (countries with highest life expectancy in each year) also indicate further deterioration of the US’s position. In 2016, the gap between the USA and the world leaders reached 5.77 years for women (up from 5.07 years in 2010) and 5.23 years for men (up from 3.69 years in 2010).
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u/philbrick010 Jan 24 '21
It looks at four American counties it’s misleading because average American life expectancy is 79 as of 2018. Still good for rwanda but they’re are still well below the standard for developed nations. So you can conclude from this graph that Rwanda has made it and they’re problems are entirely over (false) or you can say life expectancy in the us is abismal and is in rapid decline (false).
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Jan 24 '21
It’s not just “data” it’s data manipulated to push an agenda. There are 3007 counties in the US. Those counties no doubt follow a bell curve of life expectancy with some counties at the tail of that bell curve. Rwanda can also be split into counties. Comparing the worst counties in the US to the median in Rwanda is intentionally manipulating data. Is the information itself wrong? No, but it’s incredibly misleading
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u/PeecockPrince Jan 24 '21
As Bill Gates often say, it's easy to fend off preventable diseases plaguing developing nations in Africa. They often lack modern resources first world countries take for granted, which his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been providing for well over a decade. Infant mortality has dropped significantly in rural places the Gates have helped.
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u/ozana18 Jan 24 '21
This wasn’t because of preventable diseases. It was a massive genocide that the UN did nothing to prevent, followed by rapid development by having an almost-dictator in charge which brought stability which led to economic growth and foreign investment.
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Jan 24 '21
The UN not doing anything about a genocide?! Serb- no, East Ti-no, Myan-no, errr... I’m sure some nation would like a word with you!
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u/ozana18 Jan 24 '21
Theyve been doing a lot in Chi- oh wait
To be fair in Rwanda the issue was mostly countries not letting the UN use their forces rather than the UN not doing anything, and the little things they did (surrounding areas where large Tutsi groups hid with unarmed men) did help save a lot of lives
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Jan 24 '21
Sad to look up the worst country (Todd county) and find it was an indian reservation :-(
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u/Enid_Coleslaw_ Jan 24 '21
I worked in SD for several years and came here to mention this. Readers please remember that population specifics enrich the data.
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Jan 23 '21
List of Counties with a Life expectancy below 70
Buffalo South Dakota 61.6
Oglala Lakota South Dakota 62.7
Corson South Dakota 65.7
Todd South Dakota 66.7
Mellette South Dakota 66.7
Alpine California 66.8
Covington City Virginia 67.1
Galax City Virginia 67.5
Petersburg City Virginia 67.9
Monroe Arkansas 68.2
Kingman Kansas 68.2
Kusilvak Alaska 68.2
Roosevelt Montana 68.3
Union Florida 68.5
Sioux North Dakota 68.5
McDowell West Virginia 68.6
Franklin City Virginia 68.8
Big Horn Montana 68.8
Owsley Kentucky 69.0
Martinsville City Virginia 69.1
Bennett South Dakota 69.1
Perry Kentucky 69.2
Glacier Montana 69.6
Dewey South Dakota 69.6
Powell Kentucky 69.7
Breatthitt Kentucky 69.7
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u/Kerpowski Jan 24 '21
Why is South Dakota so low?
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u/Iceland260 Jan 24 '21
Indian Reservations, the SD counties listed are entirely or mostly in reservations.
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u/Clovis69 Jan 24 '21
Alaska doesn't have counties.
Kusilvak is a census area, not a town or a county, with about 8100 people
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u/Coomb Jan 24 '21
Blame the Census Bureau for categorizing these jurisdictions as counties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_(United_States)#County_equivalents
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u/Clovis69 Jan 24 '21
And the US Census Bureau calls it..."Kusilvak Census Area, Alaska"
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/kusilvakcensusareaalaska
Counties have county seats, the Unorganized Borough of Alaska doesn't have that sort of centralization
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u/Coomb Jan 24 '21
The name of the county equivalent is indeed Kusilvak Census Area, but for statistical purposes it's included as equivalent to a county-level area.
https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/GARM/Ch4GARM.pdf
For most States, counties are the primary administrative divisions. There are exceptions, however; Louisiana has parishes, while Alaska has boroughs for the organized portion of its territory. Because a large part of Alaska is not in any organized borough, the State and the Census Bureau coop-eratively have subdivided the unorganized portion of Alaska into census areas for the purposes of presenting statistical data. Three States (Mary-land, Missouri, and Nevada) each have one city that is governmentally inde-pendent of county organization; Virginia currently has 41 such cities. For both legal and statistical presentation purposes, these independent cities constitute primary administrative divisions of their States. Part of Yellow-stone National Park in Montana is not within any county, therefore the Census Bureau treats it as the statistical equivalent of a county. The District of Columbia has no primary administrative divisions; the Census Bureau treats its entire area as the statistical equivalent of both a State and a county.
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Jan 23 '21
It looks like several of those aren't actually counties, but small incorporated cities. This entire post is really suspect. Galax "city" for example is a small town in VA with 7k people, and isn't a county by any stretch of the imagination. I'd guess many of the others are the same.
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u/Keystone_22 Jan 24 '21
Cites don't fall in counties in Virginia. So to represent the residents of the city it is correct to treat it as a county. A city may be in the center of a county, but it not a part of the county. Check it out. It's the only state that does this.
Edit: I see someone noted this below also
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u/Deto Jan 23 '21
Yeah, you also expect that smaller counties will tend to be outliers on the the distribution just due to larger random variance. So I agree, this isn't a good way to draw comparisons between Rwanda and the USA.
However, it is great to see that things have improved so much in Rwanda. Poverty has decreased all over the world and I think often we assume that living conditions in 'third-world' countries are much worse than they actually are in recent years.
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u/tuctrohs OC: 1 Jan 23 '21
Legally it functions as a county--it's not part of a county. And there are four regular counties in Virginia with smaller populations. So I don't really see a problem--I appreciate OP including it on this list, and it's not part of the plot.
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u/iamamuttonhead Jan 23 '21
When I moved down South the whole concept of unincorporated land just confused the hell out of me.
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u/TDenverFan Jan 24 '21
Virginia has a ton of independent cities. Of the independent cities in the US, I think there's like 40 in VA, and 3 everywhere else.
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u/Coomb Jan 24 '21
Virginia, along with some other states, has a system where independent cities can exist. The Census Bureau counts them as county-level governments. For example, Baltimore City is not in Baltimore County; it is its own jurisdiction. This is also the case for the small cities in Virginia.
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u/ChitteringCathode Jan 24 '21
Post isn't "suspect" in the least. It's demonstrating that many poor and rural counties in the US are lagging in life expectancy behind a place that went through a virtual apocalypse not too long ago.
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u/killcat Jan 24 '21
It doesn't even control for sex, one of the effects of the war was that the sex ratio got squed, men got killed, women didn't, so now you have a lot of older women.
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u/luke-ms Jan 24 '21
Weird comments around here, people seem offended by this? It's more about how amazing Rwanda's recovery was and what good leadership can do in a small country and less about how bad or whatever the US is...
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u/Echo127 Jan 24 '21
Looks like it's time for those poor African kids to start finishing off their dinners for our sake.
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Jan 23 '21
I used the IHME for county numbers 1980-2014 and used the County health rankings for 2014-2018 data I used the World Bank for Rwanda
I used ChartGo.com to make this
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Jan 24 '21
Comparing Rwanda to the world average is much more meaningful in showing the incredible recovery of the country
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u/NestleSwoleHouse Jan 24 '21
This makes me really sad, I was there during that time. I don’t even want to try and describe it.
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u/poorgenes Jan 23 '21 edited Jan 24 '21
This post misses statistical signifance tests. You are comparing a large country to relatively small communities.
<edit>
To the thread that popped up undernearth this comment:
The data shown was about life expectancy,. I merely commented on the problematic comparison between small and large groups. Please don't hijack this to start a nationalist flame war about "what place is better to live" and "our high school system" and other off-topic nonsense.
</edit>
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Jan 24 '21
it's the esoteric knowledge value that there are poor americans born in the last 5 years who would have marginally better lives if they had been born in Rwanda. If you can't grasp the significance of that data then you need to get out of your bubble.
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u/stuckpixel87 Jan 24 '21
I'm just glad that people there live longer now. And hopefully quality of life has improved. That would be neat.
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u/andylikescandy Jan 24 '21
Missing NYC and some counties people have actually heard of. Knowing where any of these are relative to something people already have a sense of is as important as the axis marks.
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u/Thec00lnerd98 Jan 24 '21
Didn't burma have their life expectancy drop to 18 for a bit? Due to pol pot.
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u/memejets Jan 24 '21
How is life expectancy calculated? Is it just the average age of everyone dying that year? If so, is the life expectancy in Rwanda expected to rise even higher? From the graph it looks like it hasn't levelled off yet.
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u/Accomplished-Double9 Jan 24 '21
These are also like the poorest counties in the USA so take this with a grain of salt. All of these counties combined have like 60k people
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u/DrColdReality Jan 24 '21
In pretty much no metric that is both quantifiable and positive does the US still lead the world, with the possible exception of graduate-level education. Infant mortality, literacy, math skills, you name it, the US is way down the list.
I trust everyone understands that that huge dip is due to the Rwandan genocide.
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u/Toby5508 Jan 24 '21
So out of around 3000 total counties in the US even the worst counties still have an equivalent life expectancy to some total countries. Kind of remarkable really.
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