Intra-National HDI

I read somewhere that the life expectancy by country is highest in Japan but the that Japanese Americans live even longer than that.

From the report:

A Decent Standard of Living is measured using median annual gross personal earnings...

Stuff like this will be biased by differences in purchasing power of money across states. This has knock-on effects on the race/ethnicity rankings because of the different racial/ethnic compositions of states.

The UN income measures across nations incorporate estimates of purchasing power parity. I don't know of any official statistics approximating purchasing power parity across US states, though. The best approximation I can imagine might be locality pay differences for Federal employees, but those are not defined by state.

It's interesting, when you compare health statistics for white Americans to Europe as a whole, the numbers tend to be quite similar.

Interesting also to see that Latinos out live whites.

Even more interestingly Latinos in the USA out live most Europeans.

Add fact to that the fact that the eight Americas study shows that rural northern whites out live the general population and you begin to wonder if access to health care shortens life! Arhgggg!

I still find these maps interesting (life expectancy by county and dominant ancestry by county):

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/07/dont-blame-canada.php

Comparing Vietnamese-Americans in Louisiana who came from rural Vietnam to high-caste Indians and voluntary Japanese-American immigrants in New Jersey is evidence that lumping "Asians" together is misleading.

Still, it's a useful corrective to people who take the raw numbers too seriously.

Latinos in America have long had really good infant mortality statistics. I'm not sure why that is.