Very long and well argued review of sources of excess mortality in developed countries. Bottom line: Obesity! and other non-medical factors like automobiles. Big implications about how we should spend money to increase life expectancy.
This starts with saying that there is a popular telling that the more money a country spends the better life expectancy will be. Especially looking at the US I thought most people know that US doesn't get much value compared to the money spent.<p>Was that really controversial?
The blog Random Critical Analysis has made a good argument that Americans spend so much on healthcare simply because Americans spend so much on everything. Healthcare isn't exceptional in this regard. If you replace the usual GDP per capita measure of income by a measure of actual individual consumption, the US lies right on the trend line, just with higher healthcare spending and higher overall consumption than everyone else.<p><a href="https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything-you-know-about-healthcare-is-wrong-in-one-million-charts-a-response-to-noah-smith/" rel="nofollow">https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything...</a>
The best thing I've read about cross-country longevity, and I don't even care about its main point (ie USA healthcare spending). If you have a Patreon account or something similar please post it. I want more of this.
> The problem is GDP is not even particularly a good proxy for the income of households (individuals). GDP is designed to measure how much value add is produced within domestic (territorial) boundaries. It usually does a fairly decent job of this, but it does not directly tell us about the household perspective, as in, the average level of real incomes or real consumption enjoyed residents of a country (a.k.a. “material living conditions“). Most importantly, it is an increasingly unreliable proxy for this concept.<p>Would someone care to explain how this works? What's the factor causing divergence between the two? Is it the proportion of GDP being returned to overseas investors? Or a mis-counting which includes GDP of US multinationals produced by workers overseas?
I feel like this is a great article, but is very hard to digest for someone without statistical background and working knowledge of its jargon. Pretty sure it could be amended only slightly, using common language terms, for larger audience to appreciate it.