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Fjalar Finnäs, How long do Swedish-speaking Finns live? A comment on the paper by Hyyppä and Mäki, Health Promotion International, Volume 17, Issue 3, September 2002, Pages 287–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/17.3.287
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In a recent paper, Hyyppä and Mäki demonstrate and discuss interesting differences in health expectancy and mortality between the two language groups in Finland (Hyyppä and Mäki, 2001). According to their results, the Swedish-speaking males lived 8.7 years longer than the Finnish-speaking men in the same region on the west coast of the country (Ostrobothnia). Their conclusion is that these differences are to a great extent due to differences in the extent of social capital. They state that the ‘differences are astonishingly large to appear in a highly monocultural and egalitarian society’. They also argue that the lifetime of the Swedish-speaking population is one of the longest in the world.
Apparently the latter conclusion is based on a comparison of their measure of average age at death in 1991–1996 for the Swedish speakers with the traditional life expectancy calculated for most populations. In 1996, the average age at death was 77.9 years in Swedish-speaking males in Finland, while the overall male life expectancy in the country was 73.0 years. In Sweden the corresponding figure was 76.5 years (Statistics Sweden, 2002). However, a comparison of average age at death and life expectancy is inaccurate and may produce misleading results; some clarification is therefore required.
