If you broaden the definition of "healthcare system," some of these things could be considered due to a bad healthcare system.

Suicide has almost no correlation with healthcare availability (or standard of living more broadly)

And it would be a gigantic stretch to say, blame motor vehicle deaths on the healthcare system.

What both of us are saying is that healthcare system is a factor in life expectancy, but you can't deduce from life expectancy how good a healthcare system is.

It definitely could be a component, but saying that "higher life expectancy means a better healthcare system" is a gross oversimplification to the point of uselessness.

Most countries in the world don't have drug problems (on the scale of the US), the question you should be asking is "Why does the US have such an awful drug problem?"

This is not a sound causality chain, US life expectancy is pulled way down by the mountain of drug overdoses they have among young people.

Life expectancy is the result of more factors than just healthcare quality, just because a country has a higher life expectancy, does not mean they have better healthcare and vis versa.

Huh, that's really good to know. I had heard from a geopolitical analyst (my field) that oil rigs take 7 years to build and offshore takes 10 and I thought he must be exaggerating but I guess not lol.

I know almost nothing about this field, is restarting and repurposing old rigs any better than building new ones? Intuition would say yes but like I said I have no idea

>Yeah, it's not the most relevant comparison but Reddit loves US Vs EU comparisons.

This is so frustrating to me. As someone who works in a field that overlaps all of the favourite comparisons (economics, crime, transport etc.) I find myself screaming internally about how much of an oversimplification pretty much every comparison of two countries is.

When the Americans pull out their economic statistics (usually GDP/c) and Europeans pull out their crime statistics, I have to stop myself from commenting and pointing out how little value any of these metrics really provide for anything.

Damn, respect for finding that.

The big problem with comparing the US and EU countries is just how different they are. US passenger transport is totally backward compared to its EU counterpart, the almost the exact reverse is true with freight rail.

Freight rail is far more prone to accidents because A) the trains are far longer and the carriages are far heavier, and B) accidents are far less of a problem because the consequences of freight derailments are usually minimal (with non-hazardous freight at least, which is the majority of freight)

The second huge difference is population density. There are vast tracts of rail in the US that are far far away from any major population centers, which naturally makes maintenance far more difficult.

The flip side of this, of course, is the average derailment in Europe will cause more injuries and fatalities, so using fatalities as a proxy for derailments (as I accidentally did above) is unfair toward the EU.

Yes, you are absolutely correct. I'm not sure how I missed that.

My point was that, once preventative measures are at some level, as preventative measures reach diminishing returns, it is more efficient to deal with the very small number of accidents than it is to invest in trying to prevent them.

These recent Ohio and Greece accidents are the only ones I can recall that were bad enough to make the news. So at a rate of roughly 1 major accident in both the EU and US over...I would say around 5 years (although I might just not have heard about or not remember previous ones,) I would say the safety over this time has been pretty good. Definitely overwhelmingly better than road transport, which is its main competitor.

It could be just that these things happen, the EU also has over 1,000 derailments a year. It seems to me like this is just the norm and because a particularly bad one happened over there recently, everyone is paying attention

Edit: as u/nac_nabuc has pointed out, this is counting fatalities, not injuries, I must've just misread the data.

Different countries tend to use different baskets of goods to reflect their own consumption patterns. The OECD probably pulls their data from state statistics agencies (although it is possible they conducted their own survey)

It looks like pre-tax minimum wage

Sure,

In some countries, prices are higher than in others. For example, a loaf of bread in Australia might cost around $3, but in China, around 2 Yuan (which exchanges to about 50c. So (measuring it only by bread prices) $1 in China is worth 6 times as much as $1 in Australia.

If you do this for all products and weight it by the amount of each product that normal people buy, you can find the cost of living in a country. Real wages are wages/cost of living

So in the example above, NZ has a minimum wage of $US14.18, but because things are slightly more expensive in NZ than in the US, that amount of money can buy the same amount of stuff in NZ that $US11.90 could buy in the US.

When you adjust for PPP, you take this into account. If you ever see "real" vs "nominal" figures, real means adjusted for PPP, and nominal means not adjusted

This graph is adjusted for purchasing power parity.

So not only is he NATO's best recruiter, he's also a Green? Wow!

Ah ok, I understand, thanks

So different infrastructure is compatible with different types of oil, and US infrastructure is compatible with a different type of oil than US production? Is that correct?

If it is then why on Earth was it set up like that?

Really? Wouldn't self-sufficiency just mean you can cut yourselves off from the entire global market?

If you keep trading on the global market, you're susceptible to price changes (caused by OPEC) regardless of how much you produce or so I would've though.

(I'm not an expert on this so please correct me if I'm wrong)

This is a really nice graph, since you asked I was looking for some way to improve it but I genuinely can't find anything, well done!