Jul 28th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
O’Reilly: Canadian Life Expectancy is Higher than American Because “We Have Ten Times as Many People”
You can’t jump up and take notice every time Bill O’Reilly says something dumb, but as Jon Chait says this is really dumb. O’Reilly tells a viewer that Canada’s higher life expectancy is “to be expected” because since we have ten times the population, we also have ten times as many accidents and ten times as much crime:
Needless to say, it doesn’t work like that at all. Japan, which has considerably more people than Canada, has an even higher life expectancy.
59 Responses to “O’Reilly: Canadian Life Expectancy is Higher than American Because “We Have Ten Times as Many People””
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July 28th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Stupid, dishonest, or both?
July 28th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
For pity’s sake, Matt, don’t tell him!
This is the best argument yet for Texas secession!
July 28th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Is he truly that stupid, or does he just (rightly) assume that his audience is gullible and thick enough to actually believe that? Either way, it doesn’t inspire much confidence.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I think it’s safe to say that the Republicans have now completely given up on math.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I’d say dishonest, because honest answers will invalidate 90 percent of teh wingnut’s ideologies. The remaining 10 percent are impossible to verify.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Channeling O’Reilly:
Per capita? Is that some sort of French-Canadian hat?
July 28th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
The stupid… it burns!
I’ve tried to talk to a few of my friends who used to watch O’Reilly to try and understand the appeal. Most can’t explain it once they realize how many inaccuracies there are. The closest approximation is that the certainty helped them be more confident in their beliefs without checking in to them. Confirmation bias at its finest.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
In all fairness, I’m sure he meant to say that the large number of guns in the US leads to a far higher murder rate per capita than in Canada. I’ll just go ahead and put those words in his mouth for him. I’m sure he won’t mind.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
O’Reilly tells a viewer that Canada’s higher life expectancy is “to be expected” because since we have ten times the population,
In other words, Canadia is cheating. Once again. My question is whether freedom fries are still freedom fries or if they’ve reverted back to French fries?
July 28th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Facial skin pulled that tight is obviously constricting his brain.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I’m confused. If we have ten times as many people as Canada, shouldn’t we live 10 times longer than Canadians?
July 28th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Wow, that’s a really, really, stupid man.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
O’Reilly’s head is ten times larger than mine, so it stands to reason that he should be ten times stupider.
I guess this logic works in some cases.
July 28th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Only his audience is stupider than this gashead. He’s smarter than them because he figured out how to get $15 mil a year.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Bill is right, of course. Higher population density means more traffic accidents, more gun fatalities (because your target is so much closer to you), and more second-hand smoke. Not to mention the easier spread of contagious diseases like cancer and heart arrythmias.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I bet anything the implication, to his audience, is that we have too many of the wrong kinds of people, and they’re bringing down our average.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
There’s something fascinating about someone willing to say such stupid things. Even with the nasty self-interest he brings to the table. And the braggadocio.
And by “fascinating,” I mean heartbreaking, of course. He makes so much money doing such venal things.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
His dad was an accountant but Bill obviously isn’t to good with numbers. I’ve got no word on if his dad was a self involved prick or not.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
He is smart, S-M-R-T
July 28th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
No TSG, life expectancy is like Jobs, there is only a limited amount that is out there that gets divided up. It’s not like more just materializes when there’s more people.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
“Higher population density means more traffic accidents”
Not sure about that, but rural accidents are much more likely to be fatal:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10634275?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=3&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed
Regardless, urban residents drive much fewer miles and they do it at slower speeds. A lot of people in New York City never drive in their lifetimes. The subway is faster and parking is a nightmare anyway.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
OK, can we get the requisite followup scatter plot of life expectancy vs. population. I want numbers, dammit!
July 28th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
“I’ve tried to talk to a few of my friends who used to watch O’Reilly to try and understand the appeal. Most can’t explain it once they realize how many inaccuracies there are.” EWC)
O’Reilly is every burping, scratching, neurotic nerd writ large and successful. Not every sexually uptight achiever is “Nixonian”, but he is. The old line was: “Nixon is us”, and Bill is almost as archetypal. Uncool, ungainly, unhandsome, unfunny, and unappealing (especially to girls/women). Now, there’s a kind of sexually repressed Irishman that O’Reilly is to a “T”, but I grew up across the street from a guy almost exactly like him, and he was Jewish. An over-achieving nerd who got into Yale but then couldn’t parley that into getting into an American medical school. A guy who fainted while reciting the haftorah (sp.?) at his barmitzvah and who asked a girl out in his freshman year chem class by telling her on the phone that he was then L.A. Dodger star Steve Garvey (his idol). The over-heated, laugh out loud haplessness that O’Reilly displayed over the phone to that female associate producer he regarded as a bundle of yet-to-be fulfilled joy is in the same Thus Spoke Zarusthustra nerd playbook. This is why he’s got the #1 cable show. They see a pathetic dork made good and root for him with a vengeance.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Rich in PA, not sure if your serious or just sarcastic. Japan has way higher pop density but still has much higher life expectancy. Bill’s still wrong, and stupid.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
This has some pretty depressing conclusions.
Who knew, for example, that if we lumped Canada and the US together, the life in the combined unit (higher population!) will be lower than either the US or Canada alone? This relationship to population has some profound implications. Global life expectancy must be very low indeed.
Similarly, I would think it would be to the advantage of states and cities should disincorporate themselves into the smallest units possible. For example, just think of all the damage to life expectancy California is doing to its citizens by not seceding from the union and splitting into 20 or 30 separate pieces? Those life-hating, left coast liberals ought to be ashamed.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
More seriously, yes, concentrated pollution and crime can lower life expectancy, but then there are benefits of urbanization that work the other way. NYC actually has much higher than average life expectancy.
Of course, even if there were a clear correlation between density and life expectancy (and there isn’t), you’d still have to look at the actual rates of urbanization in Canada vs. the US, not just something like total population, or even average density.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Let’s keep in mind, this guy has spent years opining on the significance of various global temperature data.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Saying he is “right, of course” is incorrect. If you want to say he has a reasonable hypothesis, I’ll give you that. The problem is that this isn’t true at a national level. To wit: Great britain and Japan have higher life expectancy and higher population densities than the US. Russia would be an example of the other side of the coin.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Of course, even if there were a clear correlation between density and life expectancy (and there isn’t), you’d still have to look at the actual rates of urbanization in Canada vs. the US . . . .
Per this sourse, the U.S. is 80.8% urban, and Canada is 80.1% urban:
Urban Population Per Capita By Country
Not a surprise, really: Canada’s population is concentrated near the U.S. border, and along there pretty much resembles the U.S. in terms of population patterns.
By the way, what I would really like to see is weighted density statistics, but I haven’t been able to find those by country.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I’m confused. If we have ten times as many people as Canada, shouldn’t we live 10 times longer than Canadians?
No, it means that if nine out of ten Canadians died, then the remaining 10% of currently-existing Canadians would live ten times as long as they do now, or approximately 780 years each on average.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Yikes. Can’t we just launch him into the Great Concavity already?
July 28th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Ha-ha. It appears that at this point the US establishment’s contempt for their subjects is somewhat higher that in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. Getting close to N.Korea now.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I’m going to hazard a guess that Rich in PA intended the line “Not to mention the easier spread of contagious diseases like cancer and heart arrythmias” to be a sarcasm tag.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
A few more of Bill’s US-Canada brainteasers:
“Probably Canadians are wealthier on average than Americans, but that’s to be expected because they have to split the money fewer people ways.”
“However, the average American must be taller, because we have ten times as much more height to go around.”
“Unfortunately, for the same reason the average American must be older, because as a much larger group we must have lived a lot more years.”
“Still, the average US IQ must be higher because we have ten times as many smart people. Or maybe it’s lower, because we must have ten times as many stupid people. Ah, who gives a rip. I’m Bill O’Reilly! I just go on the assumption everyone out there is as big an idiot as me.”
July 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
The density is all in O’Reilly’s head.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Not here to defend the moron, but here’s a follow-up question.
Just why is Canada’s (and Japan’s) life expectancy higher than the U.S.?
Macau and Andorra have a higher life expectancy than Canada, Japan, and the U.S. What does that say about Macau and Andorra?
July 28th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I’m sure there is a blog somewhere devoted to doing just that, and the author is probably much more prolific than even our own Mr. Yglesias.
And it never ceases to amaze me that is is legal to say things on so-called “news” shows that are incontrovertible lies. Not opinions or mischaracterizations, but just out-and-out, easily exposed lies.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
And as a follow-up…
Why is it that U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world?
July 28th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
It’s “French Fries” again, actually. That happened following Franco-American cooperation in coordinating a UN backed ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in Summer of 2006.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Because we all die from Heart Disease and diabetes before cancer can finish us off?
July 28th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Why is it that U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world?
They aren’t across the board. We do particularly well on breast and prostate cancer, however, thanks to aggressive screening programs.
By the way, our overall deaths from cancer per capita are just around average:
Deaths From Cancer By Country
July 28th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Ed Smithe, as I am sure you will have already diligently researched, both Macau and Andorra have excellent socialized healthcare systems (Macau is a public/private system that includes free basic care for everyone, Andorra is a socialized system where the money comes from employers.) Macau also has 2 hospitals serving a population of half a million. Andorra has 1 hospital serving less than 100,000 people.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
“OK, can we get the requisite followup scatter plot of life expectancy vs. population. I want numbers, dammit!”
I can’t embed the scatter plot in a comment, but I did do the chart. I first did it with all the countries of the world combined and got a barely perceptible trend in favor of higher population. And it had an R squared of 0.08, which really sucks. Then I took out China and India (obvious outliers on population) to see what happened. My R squared went down to 0.00002 and the trend was completely flat. Just for shits and giggles, I tried a sixth order polynomial fit on the data without China and India, and got the R squared up to a whopping 0.05. It’s safe to say that there is no mathematically significant correlation at all between life expectancy and population. Bill O’Reilly is full of shit. But we knew that already.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
>Why is it that U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world?
Because you are misreading the word Japan as U.S.
Take a look at the 2005 Malignant neoplasms Deaths per 100 000 population numbers on the “Cancer, Population” tab. (This is the year with the most recent U.S. numbers.)
I’m not 100% up on divining cancer stats, but I believe if you get killed by an accident or by crime, as Mr. O’Rielly points out at the top of this post, or, by another disease, you would get counted as surviving cancer.
As a counter follow-up, how does the U.S. fair in heart disease, stroke, and diabetes survival rates?
July 28th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
What’s more, the Japanese accomplish this with: too much work, too much alcohol, too much smoking, too much stress. Its their healthcare system, which they acquired as a result of being smashed by us in WWII.
July 28th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Okay, I tried it one more time. This time I removed China, India, and any country with a population under 3 million. Now there’s a slight trend in favor of higher population and an R squared of 0.0016. And then one more time eliminating countries with population under 30 million (that includes Canada). Same trend, but the R squared is now up to 0.0043. There’s no correlation here at all. The only way to get one would be to do some serious cherry picking.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
“Japan, which has considerably more people than Canada, has an even higher life expectancy.”
This must be some sort of joke, or else it’s a very odd thing to say in refutation of someone making an elementary mistake in failing to understand what “life expentancy” means.
This really does say a lot about O’Reilly’s show–stuff like this has happened a lot in the past. He doesn’t have anyone on there who is reading his copy and has the ability to tell Bill that it’s incorrect. And he has plenty of interns and research people digging up the stuff about the child molester who got 5 months probation, etc. If O’Reilly were doing an outrage segment on the quality of his own show he’d demand that the producers be fired.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Why is it that U.S. cancer survival rates are the highest in the world?
What DTM said.
To elaborate on the reference to “aggressive screening programs”, since you’re clearly not familiar with it: “survival rate” is a fundamentally flawed statistic for cross comparisons.
See, many cancers are harmless or non-fatal. At least in the sense that, if you’re 55 years old, say, and they discover a small, not-very-aggressive prostate tumor, say, than it’s statistically not worth worrying about. You’ll die of something else long before that tumor is ever going to be a problem.
So, if your country has a really aggressive screening program (some might even say an excessively aggressive and expensive screening program), you’ll find LOTS of extra cancers, but not necessarily very many more fatal cancers. You’re just detecting a bunch of extra (statistically) harmless conditions, and driving up the stats. It’d be very much like deciding to categorize warts as a type of prostate cancer, and then cheering because the ratio of cancer diagnoses to cancer deaths went way up.
And of course the aggressive detection also has a secondary tendency to increase costs, because people who find out they have frigging cancer understandably want to get treated for it. Despite the fact that the medically sound approach in a great many cases would be to basically ignore it.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
“See, many cancers are harmless or non-fatal.”
Then why does my family get all the fatal ones? Oh yeah, bad genes.
July 28th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Since I don’t feel like working, I took a look at a plot of GDP per capita versus life expectancy for all countries (can easily be found at numerous sources). I was trying to see which countries most performed best for a given GDP. Standout countries include: Cuba, Jamaica, Jordan, Martinique, Andorra and Macau. What’s the connection between all of these countries? No clue really. They are all fairly small, but not extremely so. They are not especially homogenous. One thing they do all have in common though, is strong public health care, and free basic health services offered to all citizens. Oh, and they spend far less as a % of GDP on healthcare than the United States.
July 28th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Now Matt, that’s just absurd. Everyone knows that Japan has a higher life expectancy because Hello Kitty dolls bless their owners with long life. Japan is just the exception that proves the rule. France, Germany, Sweden, Jordan, Greece, Belgium, Australia, and Italy all have less people and longer lives. China and India have more people and shorter lives! Case closed.
July 28th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Well, now we know why Texas wants to secede from the Union: it is a public health measure to raise life expectancy in Texas (and in the rest of the US).
July 28th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
In Iceland, they live to be 600. It’s so cold there that time actually slows down. You can look it up on the internets.
July 29th, 2009 at 3:34 am
This is so dumb, it doesn’t even work as a plausible fallacy! No wonder some conservatives think Stephen Colbert is one of them–they’re the ones who take this guy seriously.
He’s such a bully, probably no one dares tell him he’s not making sense.
July 29th, 2009 at 7:09 am
This is all over the place but I have not seen anyone take the time to point out the Japanese counter-example. Priceless.
July 29th, 2009 at 11:15 am
In Iceland, they live to be 600.
Those Icelandicizers have got nothing on our Biblical friends. Methuselah almost hit 970 years old, while Adam made it to 930. (Probably would have been longer had Eve not been such a nag.) The Icelandese could live a lot longer if they weren’t such sinners and if they didn’t have that socialized medicine.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Sooo, not to crash your O’Reilly bashing, but here is a link to a table of life expectancies by US state (plus D.C.). How does nationalized heath care explain such significant disparities by *state*? Because I live in one of the states at the high end and can assure you that our health benefits for the poor are not particularly generous.
O’Reilly’s explanation is perfectly idiotic, but that does not justify concluding that nationalized healthcare is the explanation for higher Canadian life expectancy. There are also quite significant ethnic/demographic/cultural differences between Canada and the United States (assuming it’s not now a felony to mention them).
July 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Really? So Canada is 13% black, 14% Hispanic and only 5% or so Asian? It mirrors our demographics exactly? Same mix of races and ethnicities?
July 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Yes, yes, yes – of course. It’s perfectly OK for you to mention racial differences when it suits your arguments – “blacks and Hispanics are poorer than whites = racism!” – but not when it suits an argument you don’t like. Pointing out that Asians and Jews do better than whites and Christians is vile, racist and anti-semitic. And what about the fact that women live longer than men, are sent to jail less often, and are more likely to graduate from college? That, for some reason, does not prove that our society is anti-male.