Thursday, July 12, 2012

Here we have another example of two of the things propaganda does best: narrative and dichotomy. The narrative of "American Exceptionalism" is that the United States is a country with unique freedoms, history, and economic and cultural achievements. The counter-narrative is that Americans are big fat violent idiots.

Another problem is cardinal ratings. To use an example that isn't on here, the United States has the 35th highest life expectancy in the world. Which sounds pretty bad, but when put in terms of actual numbers, the US's raw number 77.71 years (77 years and 9 months) is not that far below the top nation (Japan, with 82.08 years (82 years and a month). On a bar graph, the distance between #5, Australia, 80 years, 7 months, #15 New Zealand 79 years, 7 months and #25 Great Britain (78 years, and 50 weeks) would look almost indistinguishable, especially compared to the dramatic differences in their cardinal rankings.
(http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_tot_yea-life-expectancy-birth-total-years), btw

But back to the stats they did mention: they chose 9. Which allows for the cherry picking of data. Also, some of the things they collected seemed rather...dissimilar. I don't think teen pregnancy is the same as rape.

But much more simpler, lets look at some of those stats. Actually, lets just look at one of them because life is short. I actually couldn't find data for "heart attacks", but I did find data for "heart disease deaths" in 26 developed country, again on the very useful nationmaster.com. On this graph, the US is at #13. In terms of numbers, the US has 106.5 heart disease deaths per 100,000 people, significantly less than Slovakia at 216 per, significantly more than Japan at 30 per, and almost the same as Germany at 106.1 per.

If you actually look through statistics, there is not a lot of support for theories of American exceptionalism either for the bad or for the good. The US statistically usually rates about the same as other developed countries, sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse. Usually spinning the numbers into a narrative requires a) cherry picking data and/or b) using cardinal rankings to turn what might be a small discrepancy into a horse race.


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