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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Life expectancy figures are misleading though. Many people take it to mean "this is how long an average elderly person is likely to live" but is an average of all ages at death meaning more young people dying brings down the number. As the article mentions, the primary cause for lower American life expectancy isn't that its old people are dying younger but rather the violence and drug epidemics causing more young people to die early.

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Either way the point that America is very rich but we do a comparatively terrible job of ensuring our people have long, happy lives is still true. You can pretty much apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... to any phenomenon that kills lots of Americans, except cancer and Alzheimer's.

If we are so rich, why can't we provide for the kind of programs that would deal with so many early deaths? Money should be able to deal with the issues at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.

I think America is very rich because it incentivizes people to work their asses off all the time. Or in euphemistic corporate jargon, American society optimizes the heck out of everything to appease Wall St every quarter. If they were to focus on long, happy lives, they would not be as rich in the first place.

> incentivizes

Incentivize is such an interesting word in these conversations. This word has two sides. One side is the word you would use usually with children. You want to “incentivize” them to do their homework? Add a reward. In this case the incentive isn’t that you’re rewarded for hard work. It’s that if you fuck up, and Fuck yo real bad, you can end up homeless, in debt and Ina poverty hole so deep you might never climb out of.

Many people would take "having a long, happy life" as the definition of being rich.

It's more likely that the "value" of income in the US is overestimated in international comparisons. If one compares not only lifespan, but also other measures of human health and experience, the differences between US states and European countries makes a little more sense, see: Top 20 states and European countries with the highest Human Development Index: https://i.imgur.com/jcHhVk4.png

I don't see the substantive distinction in this context. If people are being murdered at higher rates in the U.S., this lends weight to the argument that America is doing something wrong, socially, compared to France.

Not saying it isn't, just that the conclusions people draw, like that is a result of Americans being fatter than the French and dying of heart attacks earlier isn't really the primary cause.

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