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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 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?