from Hacker News

Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US

by margotli on 6/27/25, 9:45 AM with 115 comments

• by GlibMonkeyDeath on 6/27/25, 12:08 PM

  This effect has been well studied, adjusting for wealth and ethnicity (e.g. black and white American vs. European, adjusting for poverty level here https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104684118), or just 1-5% highest income Americans vs. European (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7770612/.)

  In 1990, there was no difference in life expectancy between wealthy white Americans and comparably wealthy Europeans (Fig 3 in the first link) Since then a gap has opened up among all levels of income (even the wealthiest white Americans now have lower life expectancy than comparably wealthy Europeans.) The second link looks at the biggest death causes (heart disease and cancer being #1 and #2) and conclude Americans have worse outcomes for both of these conditions.

  Basically, Europe continued to improve while America stagnated in life expectancy over this time.

  Interestingly, even in 1990, comparably poor Europeans had longer life expectancy than white Americans. So this isn't exactly new, but it seems all of American life expectancy has been stagnating, and wealth can only mitigate this to a certain degree.

• by lrvick on 6/27/25, 10:51 AM

  Fast food addiction, free-refill-fueled soda addiction, tobacco addiction, weakly trained near universal use of automobiles for daily travel, and unequal access to healthcare are staples of American culture so I am only surprised the spread is not worse.

  This has very little to do with location or genetics and everything to do with education and culture.

• by pm90 on 6/27/25, 10:34 AM

  I get the feeling that Universal Healthcare (medicare for all) would probably level the difference? What else is responsible for the almost 4yr difference with e.g. France? Is it diet? Is the air/water worse in the US?

• by thenoblesunfish on 6/27/25, 10:40 AM

  Let's all go to San Marino!

  I think the proximal answers for "why" are in the World Health Report, which tells you why people die.https://www.who.int/data/gho/publications/world-health-stati...

  Some of those you'd assume are to do with health care in general, but some (alcohol and tobacco consumption) are more like direct causes in and of themselves.

• by potato3732842 on 6/27/25, 11:08 AM

  Comically, this is also basically a map of countries in Europe scored based on how convenient the existence of each country is to the kind of people who make us-europe comparisons

  Take the absolute value and the numbers and you get an ok map of how likely someone is to be trying to mislead you if they're comparing all of the US to just this one nation.

  You could make a pretty similar map with US states vs US average.

  Correlation is a hell of a drug[1].

  [1] https://m.xkcd.com/1138/

• by keiferski on 6/27/25, 10:40 AM

  Any analysis like this that doesn’t factor in the East needing to catch up after 50 years of communist policies is misleading. I would be curious to see the improvement rate in say, Poland and Croatia over the last twenty years factored in and projected into the next two decades. Especially if we include economic success; Poland for example is probably going to be more economically successful than places like Portugal, if it isn’t already.

• by insane_dreamer on 6/27/25, 3:12 PM

  US on par with Albania. Nice.

  The US can claim "#1" status in 3 areas only:

  - a large number of top-class research universities (other countries have these two but in much much smaller number)

  - the most dominant military-industrial complex

  - deregulated pro-business environment that is a good place to make a fortune if you're talented & lucky, or know how to bullshit investors

• by amai on 6/27/25, 4:43 PM

  American billionaires have a very high life expectancy.

• by anonnon on 6/27/25, 11:57 AM

  Considering the obesity rate, isn't this impressive?

• by davedx on 6/27/25, 10:24 AM

  Spot the "democratic socialist" countries.

• by anovikov on 6/27/25, 10:21 AM

  Isn't it simply because of race?

• by hopelite on 6/27/25, 10:51 AM

  What typical Reddit ignorance that compares the avg life expectancy of the whole USA with a range of 68 years for tribal people to 85 years for “Asians”, a 17 year spread, to individual European countries.

  It has always baffled me a bit that Europeans keep making this basic type error, by comparing individual European countries that were relatively cohesive and healthy until recently, to the whole of the USA that suffers from a whole host of benefits of diversity. Europeans simply have no understanding of the real America beyond what they see in movies or hear on Reddit. How could they, most people in America don’t even have a clue what America really is like due to endless barrages of propaganda from childhood on.