Interesting graph. One thing I noticed that might make the graph easier to read: there are official post office abbreviations for states. OK for Oklahoma, AK for Alaska, ME for Maine, etc. Most people looking for their state will recognize the two-letter abbreviations easier.
People not from the US will prefer names, not some (for most of the world) meaningless abbreviations.
In my experience, many people outside of the states can only really name a few specific states. Often it’s New York, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, and/or Alaska.
I’d wager quite a bit of money that less than 50% of people outside of the US would be able to identify which name in the following list is not one of the 50 states: Navajo, Idaho, Utah, and Montana.
I’d wager quite a bit of money that I (EU) can name as many as the average US banana republic dweller.
I mean if you want to argue anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence, then you’d have to match my knowing all 50 states alphabetically. You’d also have to account for my friend in Norway who, when asked what states they could name (specifically in regard to this thread, but wasn’t originally in reference to your reply), gave me 12 names. 10 of them were US states (5 of them were in my list of 6 commonly named states) and the other 2 were US cities. That being said I will also state that they did get my question right despite my expectations.
But more broadly, I’m not saying that there aren’t people in places outside of the US who know many/all of the states or who know much more about the US than myself/most US residents. I am saying that in my personal experience talking with friends I’ve made over the Internet who do not live in the US, those friends generally know only a few states and the 6 I’ve listed are by and large the most common ones I’ve seen them list.
I probably can’t name all 50 but 40+ is a safe bet.
The 10 you mentioned is really low and not representative. On average there will not be much difference between EU and US.So I believe it’s you who made the mistake of going on anecdotals of your Norwegian friend. Even if it’s useless information to us we get a lot of it trough ‘culture’ and news if we want to or not.
Shooting here, train derailed there, flooding…
Saying half of us would think Navajo sounded rather insulting IMO.
A few of the abbreviations are already on there, just written wrong. They got “La., Ga., and Pa.”
This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. “ME” for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?
There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal “hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else”.
Waaaah, this other country has standards I don’t like, and it’s easier to whine online than to expand my knowledge, later on I’ll be crying about someone not using metric
bubbles are really not the right format for this data presentation. bar graph?
For every state that is below Alaska…
Have you seen Alaska? Have you spent time there? Alaska is crazy dangerous! How bad must your healthcare be that the constant threat of the entire environment being against you doesn’t win out for short life expectancy?!
And Mississippi, just… be better.
Clearly Australians have danger-handling handled.
People from Mississippi after seeing the graphic: “Great! I fucking hate it here!”
Nobody wants this.
Gestures broadly at soybeans and poverty.
Not necessarily a reflection of happiness or quality of life (and health). Interesting nonetheless. I’m curious if there’s correlation between general population wealth, warm weather, regional diets, potential for outdoor activities (hence warm weather, but also being coastal), and of course genetics.
I’m asking for too much, studies are long and complicated. Just want to outlive my kids here.
Well most are less overweight, but Australia being up there throws that off I think they are overweight as all the commonwealth countries generally are?
Public health. It’s fuckin great, mate.
There is a strong correlation between shitty health care and low life expectancy.
I’m always surprised by how well Utah and Idaho do. Seems like life expectancy has more to do with geography than politics.
They don’t drink alcohol or caffeine. Could have something to do with it.
Japan, Australia, Korea, all have more homogenous societies, so their malign actors have less success turning citizens against each other to benefit themselves in doing things like cheating them on healthcare.
In the US, and other large countries generally, the disparate groups are played off of each other, and otherized, and they will get a large share of the population to support hurting, cheating, those others.
Actually, not especially homogeneous. Australia is fantastically multicultural with an indigenous population who have dramatically lower life expectancies, for complex reasons. But we have universal healthcare and governments that care, which makes a huge difference.
What’s really interesting is Japan. Private health but high quality and reasonably affordable. I reckon their figures are also propped up by generational longevity which will diminish as the elderly die off and shitty western lifestyles creep in with the youth.
Counterpoint, Hawaii is a huge melting pot but has the highest life expectancy among US states. Australia also has many immigrants. People are not turning against each other.
But Hawaii has a large percentage of Japanese and Asian descendants. So to me we need to separate the data by ethnicity. DNA, culture, and food preferences has a high impact.
