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Comment by handmodel | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, Asian-Americans in New Jersey (and several other wealthy states) have a higher life expectancy than Japanese people in Japan.

Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in...

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If you are going to pick a small arbitrary region of the country to compare, then I’m sure you could pick an arbitrary region of Japan to compare to New Jersey favorably.

This is a very fair point but at the same time it there are one-million asians in New Jersey (mostly non-Japanese) and the link states that the pattern is true for lots of big states such as NJ, MA, NY, PA,etc. I agree there are probably cities in Japan or certain areas that have extra high life expectancy too but I think this cuts against the diet argument a bit.

On a recent Tyler Cowen podcast he stated that Japanese Americans have the longest life expectancy and speculated it was a combination of genetics + wealth. I think it is a good counter to the diet argument the piece puts forward. I was unable to find a link to the study he referred to though - so I linked to the one above. Hopefully my recall of Cowen's point is correct.

That could be attributed to the fact that Asians in new Jersey are more affluent and can afford better care than the japanese counterparts.

Probably a bad idea to compare a large data set (people in entire county) with comparatively vastly smaller sample set (Asian-American living in New Jersey).

agree. but same logic should apply to japan vs united states.

Japan is over 125 million people, not exactly a small set and perfectly valid to compare to the US

Does this control for wealth? Wealthier individuals have longer lifespans. If the average New Jersey Asian American is wealthier than the average Japanese, that could explain the discrepancy.

Asian American in New Jersey overwhelmingly probably refers to Indians so I don’t think you can compare that to the Japanese directly.

This is a good point - though they definitely aren't a majority. Lots of different people of different backgrounds but your point stands they may not be comparable to Japanese

http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/newjersey.pdf

It’s the largest Asian group.

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