Comments on: Interesting International Comparisons Website

By: American Ties (I-III)/International Comparisons « Welcome to the Doctor's Office

Sun, 22 May 2011 02:17:24 +0000

[…] INTERESTING INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS WEBSITE by Gwen Sharp […]

By: decius

decius — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:23:53 +0000

“Ukraine has an unemployment rate of 4.80% while The United States has 9.30%”

You have 48.39% less likely to be unemployed. (93/1000 Americans vs 48/1000 Ukrainians) This is the least intuitive and possibly worst way to compare employment.

A better use of their time and resources would be to correlate things like money spent on healthcare with infant mortality, or HIV prevalence with class divide.

By: Gwen Sharp

Gwen Sharp — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:24:24 +0000

That has some validity, except that often the U.S., any way, fares relatively badly on a lot of comparisons, particularly in terms of a lot of health indicators.

By: Gwen Sharp

Gwen Sharp — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:22:09 +0000

Good point–I added a point about that to the post.

By: Gwen Sharp

Gwen Sharp — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:18:34 +0000

Hmmm, good point–I didn’t go through and double-check calculations. I’m going to put in a note about this–sorry I didn’t get to it yesterday.

By: m

Thu, 19 May 2011 12:44:16 +0000

Depends on how you use them though. When comparing in the same league it can be quite useful (for example, I compared the US to Sweden and Sweden to the UK, finding that Sweden was better at conserving energy than the US, but worse than the UK). Of course that won’t be how a lot of people use these tools. Gapminder is probably better in that way.

By: Nirrti

Nirrti — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:32:15 +0000

I live in Memphis TN which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world and has a high rate of poverty and unemployment. It would be interesting if someone from Memphis were to move to the Ukraine. Would their chances of finding employment and having a child survive the first year increase even if they are in a supposedly less well-off country?

By: Linda

Linda — Thu, 19 May 2011 08:43:20 +0000

That’s why I thought the environmental angle was good. (Though I agree with the commenter from Ukraine that is is hardly reflecting the concern for the environment as much as inability to afford consumer goods in the same extent.) Nevertheless, we who live in Western countries (and elites in countries with less resource use per capita) need to change our life-style. It is not sustainable. It is especially not sustainable if we want to have a more fair distribution of resources among the people of the world and avoid destroying natural ecosystems and drive more species to extinction.
We have a long way to go and a lot to learn from other countries on how they manage.

A lot of the truly practical ideas on ‘how to improve their situations’ that we who live in the West can affect are about us consuming less (and not flooding local markets with cheap, subsidized produce that is (furthermore) produced in environmentally damaging ways.).

The equality measure was interesting too – that was definitely not always connected with the richest countries.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:42:19 +0000

Yeah, the grammar there gave me pause, too.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:38:46 +0000

Click on “compare ______ to other countries”. The blank is whatever country you had been looking at that was not the auto-set country.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:35:20 +0000

At first, I thought “consume less oil” meant consuming less cooking oil, in terms of eating. I quickly realized my mistake, but I thought the ambiguity was interesting.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 May 2011 06:32:21 +0000

Exactly. I thought the same thing. Yeah, you’re using less electricity, which is likely good for the environment. But it implies a lot of other things too, especially if you’re using less because you lack access to it.

By: gasstationwithoutpumps

gasstationwithoutpumps — Thu, 19 May 2011 04:13:54 +0000

“have 48.39% more chance at being employed

Ukraine has an unemployment rate of 4.80% while The United States has 9.30%”

Obviously incompetent at math. 95.2% is not 1.4839 times 90.7%.
I ignored the rest of the web site after seeing that they had no clue what the numbers meant.

By: Fedup

Fedup — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:14:33 +0000

Am I the only one who is sick of these comparison websites and lists? What purpose do they serve except to promote Western superiority and denigrate developing countries? I recognise that there are certain ideal standards that we need to meet, especially with regards to health, poverty, child mortatlity etc, but all that these comparisons, rankings etc seem to do is label certain countries as “bad”. How about some practical ideas on how to improve their situations rather than looking down our nose at them?

By: Kat

Kat — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:12:40 +0000

I have not been able to figure out how to choose the first country (as in: not the US).

But what is really flawed is that given that it compares the average, the information “You will earn x more/less” is complete BS for many developed countries.