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Every study ranking nations by health or living standards invariably offers Scandinavian social democracies a chance to show their quiet dominance. A new analysis published this week—perhaps the most comprehensive ever—is no different. But what it does reveal are the broad shortcomings of sustainable development efforts, the new shorthand for not killing ourselves or the planet, as well as the specific afflictions of a certain North American country.
Iceland and Sweden share the top slot with Singapore as world leaders when it comes to health goals set by the United Nations, according to a report published in the Lancet . Using the UN's sustainable development goals as guideposts, which measure the obvious (poverty, clean water, education) and less obvious (societal inequality, industry innovation), more than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries compiled data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health.
The massive study emerged from a decade-long collaboration focused on the worldwide distribution of disease. About a year and a half ago, the researchers involved decided their data might help measure progress on what may be the single most ambitious undertaking humans have ever committed themselves to: survival. In doing so, they came up with some disturbing findings, including that the country with the biggest economy (not to mention, if we're talking about health, multibillion-dollar health-food and fitness industries) ranks No. 28 overall, between Japan and Estonia.
[...]
The voluminous work that went into the paper may make measuring the UN goals on health seem even more daunting: The researchers were able so far to evaluate just 70 percent of the health-related indicators called for by the UN.
It may not be pretty, but "we have no chance of success if we can't agree on what's critical," said Linda Fried, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:21AM
Typing to save you from RTFA [bloomberg.com].
1. Iceland
2. Singapore
3. Sweden
4. Andorra
5. United Kingdom
6. Finland
7. Spain
8. Netherlands
9. Canada
10. Australia
11. Norway
12. Luxembourg
13. Ireland
14. Malta
15. Germany
16. Denmark
17. Cyprus
18. Belgium
19. Switzerland
20. Italy
21. Brunei
22. Portugal
23. Israel
24. France
25. Slovenia
26. Greence
27. Japan
28. United State
29. Estonia
30. New Zealand
Of course, this is "Using the UN’s sustainable development goals as guideposts, which measure the obvious (poverty, clean water, education) and less obvious (societal inequality, industry innovation), more than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries compiled data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health."
Honestly though, on what metric could the USA be considered the greatest country on earth? We're not the first or best-functioning democracy. We're not the only place with freedom. We're a superpower, but financially screwed and outsourcing all our work. Manifest destiny is long behind us, and decline awaits...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:54AM
"Honestly though, on what metric could the USA be considered the greatest country on earth?"
Military budget.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @05:22AM
"We're a superpower, but financially screwed..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @12:20PM
ftfy
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mykl on Monday September 26 2016, @01:25AM
Proportion of population that is incarcerated
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:54AM
Well, we have our military, but even that in its current state is being dismantled. Allowing trannies to serve, being PC, railroading out personnel for manufactured or otherwise bullshit reasons to avoid paying out retirements, fostering a dog-eat-dog rather than cooperative mindset (specifically, the military was mostly apolitical at the lower levels and didn't get political until the mid-level officer or senior enlisted levels, but now the military is about both backstabbing and obedience to the masters at all levels), Obama's mysterious "purge" of high-level officials...the list goes on and on.
Coincidentally, the deep state wants more and more immigrants, homosexuals, and trannies. The reason for this is to get them into the military, to create a "Praetorian Guard" of sorts which (in the case of immigrants) is composed of thugs from brutish cultures and with no loyalty to the American people. They were raised with violence and when allowed creature comforts as prizes are willing to do whatever their masters demand. The other case, Homosexuals and trannies, are mostly submissive and eager to serve by nature and yet finally being allowed a taste of that power which was denied to them for so many years, and so fit the mold of the Praetorian Guard very well.
(Score: 5, Touché) by janrinok on Sunday September 25 2016, @08:18AM
And there is your problem in one sentence. You want equality and cooperation, but you are not prepared to offer equality to someone who doesn't meet your view of humankind. You are not prepared to 'cooperate' with them to find their role in society because, er because, well because why exactly? There was a man around in the 1930s and 40s who had similar extreme views as to what 'normal' people should be like. Things didn't work out too well for him however.
As usual, your head is up your ass, but we will still accept you here. Some of us understand what the words actually mean, we don't just spout them off as though they justify our own skewed view of the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @07:31PM
Accept is a strong word.
Tolerate. Maybe even just permit.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by isostatic on Sunday September 25 2016, @08:04AM
Honestly though, on what metric could the USA be considered the greatest country on earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk [youtube.com]
There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday September 25 2016, @11:38AM
Any set of guidelines that would produce this ordering must be pretty strange, or has been interpreted strangely. I've lived in a number of the countries mentioned, and visited several more. Spain ahead of Germany? The UK ahead of, well, anyone else in Western Europe?
So I followed the chain of links down the rabbit hole. TFA at Bloomberg has the title "America is not the greatest country on earhh. it's no. 28". This is based on a scientific article published in the Lancet, which is indeed based on the UN's sustainable development goals, but only on the health-related goals.
So we already have a very different situation from what TFA claims - this is only about health. Still, I just don't see the UK in place 6. For example, the life expectancy in the UK is ranked 33 in the world, behind most other Western European countries. So let's look at the statistics in the Lancet article. Very praiseworthy: if you click on the links, they puts a lot of information in their figures [thelancet.com].
It turns that they include some strange things in their definition of health. For example, both Switzerland and Austria score terribly for "disasters". The only disasters in these two countries that I can imagine are winter avalanches in the Alps during ski season. (Avalanch deaths in Switzerland average about 25/year). Meanwhile, the UK receives a perfect score - apparently because there are never deaths from natural disasters in the UK. [sky.com]
Even with this penalty, Switzerland scores better than the UK using an arithmetic mean. The authors make the strange decision to base their results on the geometric mean. This means that a single outlier (in this case, the score for disasters) carries disproportionate weight. They choose this method, because other UN studies have used it. I tried going farther down the rabbit hole, but could not find a justification for this. In any case, it seems clearly wrong for this application.
It's not clear what agenda the authors are following, but the analysis is just bizarre. Or perhaps they don't have an agenda at all - they just don't understand statistics? Of course, the results become even stranger after the MSM is done misinterpreting them.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:14PM
In English lessons at school I remember us discussing a book called "How to Lie with Statistics". This report looks like a good case for such a text book.
I am sure that I (or anyone) could live in Switzerland without getting into an avalanche. I could live in America without getting obese. I could live in the UK and be killed in an avalanche during a sking holiday in Switzerland, or more likely by a cyclist riding on the pavement back home.
I am in the UK and was thinking only earlier today that if I had my life again I would leave it for elsewhere. It is getting too crowded and getting taken over by bonkers greenies. Thanks to Mrs T we have become a spiv economy (David Steele's phrase) with everthing a scam. While the rich-poor divide is not as great as in the USA, there are large numbers of people making big money as middlemen or other non-jobs, pushing paper around and relaying phone calls, while a much greater number of people are working their guts out for subsistence with no knowing if their job will still exist the next day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @02:01PM
"I am sure that I (or anyone) could live in Switzerland without getting into an avalanche. I could live in America without getting obese. I could live in the UK and be killed in an avalanche during a sking holiday in Switzerland, or more likely by a cyclist riding on the pavement back home."
Yes, you could. However, the statistics are not talking about you or anyone; they're talking about everyone. That's why they're called statistics and not anecdotics :)
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday September 25 2016, @09:42PM
My point was that this report has little to do with how good a country was to live in.
(Score: 3, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Sunday September 25 2016, @09:00PM
The authors make the strange decision to base their results on the geometric mean. This means that a single outlier (in this case, the score for disasters) carries disproportionate weight.
Geometric mean actually reduces the effect of outliers. Try it yourself:
(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 1000) / 5 ~ 202
(1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 1000) ^ (1/5) ~ 7.5
A geometric mean is just an arithmetic mean of logarithms. And most real world data tends to be more nicely distributed about it's logarithm than it's immediate value. See Benford's Law [wikipedia.org] for more info.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gidds on Monday September 26 2016, @01:14PM
Geometric mean may reduce the effect of high outliers, but it exaggerates the effect of low ones even more:
(1 + 997 + 998 + 999 + 1000) / 5 = 799
(1 * 997 * 998 * 999 * 1000) ^ (1/5) ≃ 251
However, there may be other good reasons for using it. The UN chose it because [undp.org]:
[sig redacted]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @12:18AM
> The only disasters in these two countries that I can imagine are winter avalanches in the Alps during ski season
Your lack of imagination isn't a scientific basis for drawing conclusions.
Not only are there avalanches in the winter, there are landslides, [google.com] floods, [floodlist.com] and earthquakes (2 per day, 10 per year of at least 2.5 magnitude [seismo.ethz.ch])
Kinda funny how you went out of your way to try to prove the scientists were idiots making basesless claims but you couldn't be bothered to check your own assumptions. I think that pretty much sums up your entire approach to understanding the world, don't you agree?
(Score: 2) by Jiro on Sunday September 25 2016, @05:04PM
If the US has different racial groups than the other countries (and it certainly does, especially compared to Iceland, Singapore, and Sweden), statistics that compare it to other countries are vulnerable to a Simpson's paradox [wikipedia.org] where even if each racial group does better individually than they do in the other country, the other country can come out looking better because it has a larger proportion of the higher scoring racial group.
Where does the US rank if you rank whites only? (Or Asians, when comparing to Singapore.)