Isn’t North and South Korea the best comparison for life expectancy versus communism/capitalism?
No, specifically because North Korea is not communist in any meaningful sense of the word. There’s no reason to believe it is representative of a generic communist state, and it does not compare well to the majority (to any?) of the communist states out there. Even if you do consider it communist, it is an outlier among those states. It simply does not make sense.
That chart does show North and South Korean life expectancies increasing at a similar rate (until the mid 90s, of course) but that does not mean there’s no difference in other states. Yes, life expectancy has been increasing globally but it is not uniformly distributed. China went from “average” to “above average” since the Communist Revolution. India went from “below average” to “below average”.
We could also look at Cuba or Vietnam as examples (looking at 2020). They’re much smaller and i don’t have the same kind of data on hand for them, but compared to the global numbers they’re closer to the “more developed countries” than they are to the global average. Again, India, is down in the “less developed countries”. If you care, North Korea is at 75 in 2020, above the global average despite… everything going on there. And yes, for the record, South Korea is doing better. They’re doing better than most, even better than (for example) Germany.
(I do not know how trustworthy those numbers are for North Korea tbh. I know China’s 2020 and beyond numbers have also been criticized but I’m working with what I have.)
And yes, life expectancy is not the be-all, end-all measurement of all value. It does matter, though.
