The proof is in the pudding

Not necessarily a reflection of happiness or quality of life (and health). Interesting nonetheless. I'm curious if there's correlation between general population wealth, warm weather, regional diets, potential for outdoor activities (hence warm weather, but also being coastal), and of course genetics.

I'm asking for too much, studies are long and complicated. Just want to outlive my kids here.

Interesting graph. One thing I noticed that might make the graph easier to read: there are official post office abbreviations for states. OK for Oklahoma, AK for Alaska, ME for Maine, etc. Most people looking for their state will recognize the two-letter abbreviations easier.

In broad strokes, the three biggest drivers for life expectancy are education, health care, and social safety nets (i.e. unemployment insurance, subsidized/free child care, housing support, UBI, etc). Of those, I think education is the most important because that will drive the rest to improve as well.

Or just use full names.

Japan, Australia, Korea, all have more homogenous societies, so their malign actors have less success turning citizens against each other to benefit themselves in doing things like cheating them on healthcare.

In the US, and other large countries generally, the disparate groups are played off of each other, and otherized, and they will get a large share of the population to support hurting, cheating, those others.

Well most are less overweight, but Australia being up there throws that off I think they are overweight as all the commonwealth countries generally are?

There is a strong correlation between shitty health care and low life expectancy.

People from Mississippi after seeing the graphic: "Great! I fucking hate it here!"

People not from the US will prefer names, not some (for most of the world) meaningless abbreviations.

Nobody wants this.

Gestures broadly at soybeans and poverty.

For every state that is below Alaska...

Have you seen Alaska? Have you spent time there? Alaska is crazy dangerous! How bad must your healthcare be that the constant threat of the entire environment being against you doesn't win out for short life expectancy?!

And Mississippi, just... be better.

Well, Spain has a very good universal health care system, which by the way places an emphasis on prevention, and is universally liked for the quality of life (work to live, not live to work), people are super social, weather is generally very good, good food is a religion, people walk, etc... so we could infer some things from this.
Hawaii, from what I remember (two decades ago) had a bit of that vibe. A lot of obesity, though.

if the text was going to require zooming anyway it may as well have used the actual name instead of the weird shorthand that only people from the states know

Actually, not especially homogeneous. Australia is fantastically multicultural with an indigenous population who have dramatically lower life expectancies, for complex reasons. But we have universal healthcare and governments that care, which makes a huge difference.

What’s really interesting is Japan. Private health but high quality and reasonably affordable. I reckon their figures are also propped up by generational longevity which will diminish as the elderly die off and shitty western lifestyles creep in with the youth.

Public health. It’s fuckin great, mate.

bubbles are really not the right format for this data presentation. bar graph?

In my experience, many people outside of the states can only really name a few specific states. Often it's New York, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, and/or Alaska.

I'd wager quite a bit of money that less than 50% of people outside of the US would be able to identify which name in the following list is not one of the 50 states: Navajo, Idaho, Utah, and Montana.

I don't have proof but I guess the lower a population is the more value a single citizen is in the eyes of the government in turn much higher life expectancy.

I didn't know Japan had private health, does that mean they have uninsured? What percent are the minorities in Australia though? I just looked it up it's similar to the US. But its a smaller country, which makes it more difficult to play groups off of each other. My point is still correct, larger, more diverse countries allow malign forces to turn the population against each other more, which in the case of the US has led the population to support allowing others to die of preventable illness.

As American politics and decisions have a big influence on what is happening in the world, the chance that someone from outside the US knows something about the US are bigger, way bigger than the other way round. We speak your mother tongue, but you probably don't speak any of ours...

That said, it would be rather interesting to see Navajo as a state. It would probably located in the Utah/Arizona/New Mexico area. If it existed.

This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. "ME" for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?

There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal "hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else".

I'm always surprised by how well Utah and Idaho do. Seems like life expectancy has more to do with geography than politics.

It's the Mormonism.

They don't drink alcohol or caffeine. Could have something to do with it.

Id like to think its because people live healthier lifestyles in Alaska but I know better.

So much meth.

As American politics and decisions have a big influence on what is happening in the world, the chance that someone from outside the US knows something about the US are bigger, way bigger than the other way round.

I do understand that, but that's part of the reason I listed those 6 states as in general I feel those are the most influential, noteworthy, and/or easily identifiable states. Even as an American I don't know the last time I heard about news happening in Arkansas much less something that should be worthy of international news.

We speak your mother tongue, but you probably don't speak any of ours...

You might be surprised by this. I haven't done much digging to find scholarly sources since I have things going on this weekend, but I did find one (non scholarly) source claiming that the percentage of bilingual people in the US (as defined by people who use multiple languages on a daily basis, not just able to speak it) was 23% which was just below their claimed EU average of 25%.

I know you're use of "you/your" was likely more meant as me as an American rather than as a specific individual however as for myself as an individual, I took 3 years of German which I'm rather rusty with now considering that was over a decade ago at this point, and I've been studying Japanese with a tutor for the last 1.5 years now.

Congratulations for speaking more than just American. Bilinguality in the US is an odd thing, and often caused by people who have English as their second language.

Clearly Australians have danger-handling handled.

Cool! Only 30 more years to go! The way the days are whizzing by, it'll be over in no time!

A few of the abbreviations are already on there, just written wrong. They got "La., Ga., and Pa."

Counterpoint, Hawaii is a huge melting pot but has the highest life expectancy among US states. Australia also has many immigrants. People are not turning against each other.

But Hawaii has a large percentage of Japanese and Asian descendants. So to me we need to separate the data by ethnicity. DNA, culture, and food preferences has a high impact.

I’d wager quite a bit of money that I (EU) can name as many as the average US banana republic dweller.

Waaaah, this other country has standards I don't like, and it's easier to whine online than to expand my knowledge, later on I'll be crying about someone not using metric

I mean if you want to argue anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence, then you'd have to match my knowing all 50 states alphabetically. You'd also have to account for my friend in Norway who, when asked what states they could name (specifically in regard to this thread, but wasn't originally in reference to your reply), gave me 12 names. 10 of them were US states (5 of them were in my list of 6 commonly named states) and the other 2 were US cities. That being said I will also state that they did get my question right despite my expectations.

But more broadly, I'm not saying that there aren't people in places outside of the US who know many/all of the states or who know much more about the US than myself/most US residents. I am saying that in my personal experience talking with friends I've made over the Internet who do not live in the US, those friends generally know only a few states and the 6 I've listed are by and large the most common ones I've seen them list.

I probably can't name all 50 but 40+ is a safe bet.
The 10 you mentioned is really low and not representative. On average there will not be much difference between EU and US.

So I believe it's you who made the mistake of going on anecdotals of your Norwegian friend.
Even if it's useless information to us we get a lot of it trough 'culture' and news if we want to or not.
Shooting here, train derailed there, flooding....
Saying half of us would think Navajo sounded rather insulting IMO.