The New York Times decided that the Fourth of July was the best time to post a video titled, “Please Stop Telling Me America Is Great” that makes the case that the United States is “just okay.”
My colleague Tom Rogan already replied with a post defending the honor of the U.S., but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on a few misleading data points that the video relies on.
Two arguments in particular caught my ear, based on Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development data.
“America is the richest country in this [OECD] club, but we’re also the poorest, with a whopping 18 percent poverty rate — closer to Mexico then Western Europe,” the narrator tells us.
The problem with using this metric to draw the conclusion the way video authors Taige Jensen and Nayeema Raza do, however, is that the relative poverty rate measurement they’re relying on is based on the percentage of people who are below 50% of median income in that country. In other words, because richer countries have higher levels of median income, there is a considerably higher threshold to get above this poverty line.
This is how the U.S. ends up with a higher relative poverty rate than Mexico, Turkey, Latvia, and Lithuania, where nobody would seriously argue the poor have higher standards of living than in the United States.
In terms of median income, the U.S. actually ranks fourth — well ahead of most of Western Europe save Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland, which have a higher cost of living.
The other piece of data is to look at OECD information on life expectancy and infant mortality, to suggest that we have a worse healthcare system than even Bosnia.
But relying on infant mortality and life expectancy is seriously flawed, because records are not kept uniformly across countries, and the statistics are heavily influenced by external factors that have nothing to do with the quality of a health system.
Among other things, an American Enterprise Institute paper noted, “babies who are not viable and who die quickly after birth are more likely to be classified as stillbirths in countries outside the United States, especially in Japan, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, the Netherlands, and France … In the United States, however, nonviable births are often recorded as live births, making the US infant mortality rate appear misleadingly high. ”
Additionally, American doctors are more inclined to go further in attempting to save babies who have low odds of survival. “In this case, the additional health care may actually worsen reported infant mortality rates and misleadingly suggest poor care in the United States,” the paper explained.
The video says that “we live sicker and shorter lives” than other countries despite paying more for healthcare. But the problem with life expectancy statistics is that they do not control for a number of factors including demographics, early deaths due to crime, or accidents that have nothing to do with the healthcare system. If one were to look at life expectancy at 65 (as opposed to birth), which controls for some of these factors, the U.S. is at 18.1 years, which is ahead of the OECD average of 18.
Unfortunately, the videomakers at New York Times were too eager to attack America on its birthday to avoid misleading their viewers.
