In a recent post I passed on the view of the Economist that the United States was ranked number 17 in the standings of Democratic countries. Given the number of countries in the world, that still gave us a chance to make the playoffs, but it is still somewhat dispiriting to know you’re trailing Malta and Spain.
We could take some solace from the fact that any such ranking is necessarily subjective, sort of like the college rankings, which consistently fail to give my own alma mater the number one ranking it deserves.
But today, I must report on a far more objective ranking, which ranks not our freedom, but our longevity. We Americans are living longer, but not as long as folks in 40 other countries. That’s right, we’re number 42 in the rankings. Not only are we low in the standings, we have been plummeting faster than the Red Sox in August. Just 20 years ago, we were in eleventh place.
Countries that surpass the United States include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
All is not lost, we are ahead of a heck of a lot of countries.
The shortest life expectancies were clustered in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by HIV and AIDS, famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.
On the other hand, while Americans may not expect to live as long as other people, they are probably number one in the amount of time they can expect to spend working in the time they do have on this earth. Perhaps we should adopt a national motto, something of a melding of that of the State of New Hampshire and the Vulcan greeting: “Work Long and Die”.
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