Life expectancy differences in Mississippi vs. the UK is largely due to race. Mississippi is about 36% black, and blacks in the US have a 5+ year shorter life expectancy than whites.
Because if there's no discrepancy, or a smaller one, it seems to suggest that maybe GDP and square-footage-of-your-house is actually not all that important.
To me your comment seems to be implying one of two things:
1) Black people are biologically hardwired to have a shorter life expectancy than white people
2) A shorter life expectancy among black people doesn't count -- it's only life expectancy among white people that matters
Could you clarify further if you meant one of these, or if you meant something else that I was not able to pick up on?
Neither, simply that there appears to be little correlation between GDP per capita and life expectancy between Mississippi and the UK, and the lion's share of the difference is due to lower life expectancies amongst blacks (the reasons for their lower life expectancy being something I didn't get into at all).
The black fraction of the population of UK was never mentioned. If you're going to compare the life span of two places, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bring race up. If you're going to bring it up, you need to justify why its relevant. You can probably find lots of demographic lines along which you can split a population to support this argument or that argument. Some fraction of Mississippi is black, as is some fraction of the UK. And each sub-demographic has some life expectancy. Different places have different population mixes, but those mixes are de-facto representative of those places. If the argument is about non-black life spans, your argument would make sense. But if it's about the average lifespan of the region, and the demographic mix is different, it's non-sensical to filter using different cohorts since that mixture difference is a real difference between the regions.
