Speaker 1: A very interesting new study finds that Americans on average die younger in
conservative and red states. Now, this won't be a surprise to some of you who know some
of the underlying data here. But let's start with the study. As reported by The Guardian,
more liberal policies on environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes and tobacco taxes associated
with lower mortality. The authors of the study write simulations indicate that changing all
policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation could have saved over 171,000
lives in 2019. Changing to a fully conservative orientation could cost more than 217,000 lives.
The study was published in PLoS One, PLoS One, PLoS One. I always forget how it's pronounced,
which is a science journal. The authors are from Syracuse, Syracuse University, Harvard, VCU,
University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin and University of Western Ontario, Canada.
I have to tell you, this really isn't surprising. There is a very interesting metric, and when we
talk about the United States, sometimes it's said, well, the United States could really be divvied up
into six different regions. That would be as big as many European countries or 12 different
regions. I have seen there is a metric called the Human Development Index. This metric takes
into account health, education, income and life expectancy to give us a number essentially below
zero and one one being very high and zero being very low. And when you look around the world,
you see maybe not like a hugely surprising list of countries at the top of the list. So,
for example, countries with a very, very high HDI human development index. Switzerland, Norway.
Iceland. Hong Kong. Australia. No real surprises there. Right there with them. Denmark. Sweden.
Ireland. Germany. Netherlands. Finland. Singapore, Belgium. New Zealand. Canada. You start to see
trends in the types of places that these are. You can assign values just like you can to a country,
to a state. And one of the things that you will see, which are totally separate from this study
that we're talking about here, is that the states with the highest HDI is also are overwhelmingly
blue states. You've got at the top, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire,
Colorado, D.C., North Dakota, Washington, Hawaii, New York, Maryland, Vermont. So we are 1314 in.
With one red state and one purple state of New Hampshire. This is not new information to many of
us. Now, what's an important question in general, is the life expectancy specifically? Do they die
younger because they're poorer and they're poorer due to Republican economic policy? Or do they die
younger because of the direct effect of Republican social and other policies? The answer pretty
clearly seems to be a sort of all of the above type of thing. Going back to the article a little
bit, especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of
death, between gun safety and suicide mortality among men. Between labor and alcohol induced
mortality. Between both the economic tax and tobacco tax. And cardiovascular mortality. Very,
very interesting. And the study authors also note that American life expectancy as a whole is lower
than most high income countries falling between Cuba and Albania. One of the things that sometimes
will come up on the show is I want to move to a country with a much higher standard of living.
And one of the things to understand is that a lot of times the folks saying that are in states with
low standards of living, it's difficult to move to a lot of the countries on the list I showed you.
But it's much easier, relatively. It's not free. There's still cost. And sometimes those states are
more expensive. You can much more easily move to a state in the U.S. with an equivalent standard of
living. To many of those European countries, because the United States is so stratified.
And the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi on every indicator could not be more
different. So interesting study, not surprising information, but interesting to see it laid out
so cleanly in terms of the data. We'll link to the study so you can take a look at it for yourselves.