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by tptacek 4906 days ago
It would be shocking if the US had infant mortality rates that were apples-apples close to Sweden. Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous.

The lede on stories about US infant mortality isn't that Sweden outdoes us. It's things like "the US ranks alongside Qatar and Croatia". Those are the assertions I think we need to be more careful about.
2 comments
grecy 4906 days ago
> Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous.

The population has no impact when we're looking at per-capita statistics.

Canada and Australia have the highest immigration rates in the world, so their homogeneity is going down, yet statistics like these are not going up.

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tptacek 4906 days ago
That's silly. Compare Sweden to Washington State, which is similarly sized, more diverse, and has the second best infant mortality stats in the US.

The point is that Sweden is a cherry-picked comparison.

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grecy 4906 days ago
> The point is that Sweden is a cherry-picked comparison.

Choose any other OECD country then. The results are the same.

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avalind 4906 days ago
Totally Agree with you. I would think that a big reason as to why the U.S has the rankings it has is the heterogeneity of the US population.
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hollerith 4906 days ago
According to yesterday's article in the NYT, this trend of the US's not keeping up with this group of 14 wealthy countries was absent in 1950 and only really started picking up steam after 1980. Since the US population was already significantly more heterogenous in 1950, why didn't that heterogeneity show through in the life-expectancy data for 1950?
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avalind 4906 days ago
The difference in heterogeneity between the US and the other countries has probably increased from 1950 to today. But I also suspect that some of this difference in life-expectancy between the US and the 14 others is that it might be easier to implement preventive health care measures that reach the whole population in societies that have more comprehensive health care insurance by default.

It would be really interesting to see data comparing the healthiest people in the US and other similarly developed countries.

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