| ▲ | nozzlegear 5 hours ago |
| Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison. |
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| ▲ | lostlogin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It’s this line of argument that gets used when health spending is compared between countries. The US has no willingness to try move the bar and bring up the average. I got mine! |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hm no I don't think so, my healthcare is ass and I'd love to be on the state-sponsored insurance that my wife has, for example. But if we're going to shoot for the stars, I think it's important to make truthful comparisons instead of starting from a bedrock mired in bad data, bullshit and jingoistic spite. |
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| ▲ | stackghost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy? |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't know who does this except mostly western Europeans trying to score points on the "I happened to be born in the place that has the most perks for people like me" scoreboard. If you want to compare large geographic areas, you could at least start by including Eastern Europe in these "Europe versus everyone else" comparisons, which would make things look much less flattering for Europe. | |
| ▲ | pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because we don't and we shouldn't? Don't defend bad practice in discussing the US by inventing bad practice that people you just made up are using to discuss Canada, Russia, and China. > provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy? You are literally insisting here that aggregate data conceals differences between groups of people. The end of your sentence angrily argues against the beginning of your sentence. edit: the reason we need to disaggregate is because we need to talk about Mississippi. We need to talk about black America. We need to talk about Chicagoland separately from downstate Illinois. We need to talk about black Chicago separately from white Chicago. Aggregation helps us avoid things. | | |
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