So, I was in the kitchen all day and evening and took the laptop with me to play with ideas when I had off moments (Eh, it’s boring being me). Anyway, here is my response to your last – it’s long, but I needed something to do to kill the down time:
bosco said:
I thought the article I posted was interesting. I agree, not rigourous in some ways. But thought-provoking anyway.
It was thought provoking, and I think most of us are open to new ideas. And I don’t see where anyone here is trying to pick a fight with you over this issue. They, and I, disagree with the report you linked to because there are no new ideas there and it suffers not so much from a lack of rigor, as its fundamental flaw is that it is skewed.
I’m not saying that
some of the things that the authors think need to happen aren’t good or that I disagree with everything they say. What I
am saying is that they are quite obviously skewing or cherry picking facts and figures in order to try and fool readers in an attempt to gain support for their desired outcomes.
bosco said:
The terms 'liberal' and 'progressive' don't mean the same thing in the rest of the world as they have been warped by the media to mean in the US…
I’ll take your word for that. But I did some independent research of my own on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and found that although they claim to be “…an independent, non-partisan research institute…” the reality is somewhat different.
Socialists and leftists formed it, many of its supporters are socialist groups or labor unions with socialist or anti-corporate leanings, and most of the staff are well-known socialists/leftists, some even come from prominent socialist families.
For example, Seth Klein, the Director of the British Columbia offices of CCPA, comes from a family that the UK Guardian newspaper described the history of as “like a history of the Left.” Google his sister Naomi Klein (and her husband Avi Lewis), his father Dr. Michael Klein, or his grandfather Phillip Klein to see the three generations of socialist activism for yourself.
Go to the CCPA website and see the board members, their organizations, and the national staff. Spend a few minutes researching them and you will see a consistent theme of leftist politics, socialism, “internationalism”, and anti-corporate activism that is very apparent. Google the name of the organization and include the words “Marxist”, “Socialist” or “Activist” and see all of the Marxist, Socialist and Activist organizations that link or quote CCPA reports.
The simple fact of the matter is that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is an organization created, funded, supported, managed, and staffed by people with the same political views. Spending a few minutes with their reports will reveal that their political views color their so-called “independent research”.
I’m not knocking Socialists (at least note in this context). But I immediately suspect any group that claims independence while hiding their true nature. And when I find not just a “lack of rigor”, but fabrications and misconstrued statistics throughout the report – I think my suspicions are confirmed.
bosco said:
It's BAD SCIENCE, fuzzy math!!.
It’s not even that good. It’s bad science and fuzzy math skewed and cherry picked in order to promote a particular political position.
bosco said:
It was pretty predictable that people would complain about the lack of 'methodological rigour' and the 'lack of causality.' As if demographics and economics were a field like physics where anyone could demonstrate causality in any rigourous sense.
Statistics can be misleading when the intent is there. And actual causality can be something not apparent in the figures – or as someone else here said - it could all be due to annual snowfall in Nordic countries. But you have to look behind the stats and think about it before you trust or distrust them. I think you took too much of the CCPA's stats as gospel without any independent thought or research. Or are you saying nothing is provable or disprovable in demographics or economics and we are all free to believe whatever we choose to?
bosco said:
My definition of mediocre is to live in a country with so much money that chooses to allow such a high infant mortality rate, for one thing. So--tell me how is that statistic is flawed?
From US News and World Report:
The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless. And some countries don't reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth. Thus, the United States is sure to report higher infant mortality rates. For this very reason, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which collects the European numbers, warns of head-to-head comparisons by country.
Infant mortality in developed countries is not about healthy babies dying of treatable conditions as in the past. Most of the infants we lose today are born critically ill, and 40 percent die within the first day of life. The major causes are low birth weight and prematurity, and congenital malformations. As Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, points out, Norway, which has one of the lowest infant mortality rates, shows no better infant survival than the United States when you factor in weight at birth.
Look at Iceland. It uses the same standards as we do. But it also has a population under 300,000 that is 94 percent homogenous, a mixture of Norse and Celts. Similarly, Finland and Japan do not have the ethnic and cultural diversity of our 300 million citizens. Even factoring in education and income, Chinese-American mothers have lower rates, and African-Americans higher, than the U.S. average. Environment matters as well. Lower infant mortality tracks with fewer teen pregnancies, married as opposed to single mothers, less obesity and smoking, more education, and moms pregnant with babies that they are utterly intent on having. Yet, there are still biological factors that we don't understand that lead to spontaneous premature delivery.
Or, the Congressional Budget Office:
Problems of definition and measurement, however, hamper cross-national comparisons of health statistics. Alternative measures of infant mortality may provide better information but cannot completely compensate for differences among countries in the overall rates of reporting of adverse pregnancy outcomes. For example, very premature births are more likely to be included in birth and mortality statistics in the United States than in several other industrialized countries that have lower infant mortality rates…Low birthweight is the primary risk factor for infant mortality and most of the decline in neonatal mortality (deaths of infants less than 28 days old) in the United States since 1970 can be attributed to increased rates of survival among low-birthweight newborns. …Because of the high quality and widespread availability of neonatal intensive care in the United States, a low-birthweight baby born in this country probably has a better chance of surviving than anywhere else in the world.
Other information I found indicates that we have had something like a 400% increase in multiple births in this country that has only just recently started to decline. The CDC says that multiples are highly likely to be low birthweight, and therefore at higher risk of mortality. Much of that increase in multiples is due to fertility treatments that are almost exclusively used by the economically well to do. I also found medical studies comparing multiple births to singletons mortality stats between the rich and the poor and while singletons of the poor have a higher mortality rate than those of the rich, the multiples were much higher among the rich and the mortality rate was many times higher. Also, I found a report about how Europe deals with infant mortality from low birthweight: “High order multiple pregnancies are at significantly higher risk of complications than singleton pregnancies, for the fetuses, babies and the mothers. The aim of all fertility treatments is to achieve a healthy live child for each couple seeking treatment. The realization that high order multiple pregnancy can and should be avoided has increasingly led, in most European countries, to a restriction of the number of embryos for transfer to two or even one, without a significant decrease in a couples' chance of achieving a pregnancy.”
What all of that says to me is that the original comparisons were flawed because other countries do not keep their statistics with the same rigor as does the United States. It also tells me that differences in infant mortality, if they are higher here, can be due to a number of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with healthcare.
In the end, I choose not to advocate changing our government to a socialist system in order to throw money at a problem that may not even exist, much less be something that more money will fix.
bosco said:
However, what I find interesting is the rebuttals which seem to say that since people take home less money, can eat out less, and have to be more frugal when replacing appliances, that therefore they are condemned to a 'life of mediocrity.' Kind of shows an interesting view of what 'mediocrity' is, don't you think?
I was thinking more of the fact that the re-distribution of wealth and income through taxation and regulation means that no matter how hard one works it is very hard to ever be any better financially. In fact, it was this quote, by a Norwegian, from one of the articles I quoted/linked in my earlier post, that I was thinking about when I made my statement about mediocrity;
To me it is that equality in Norwegian society which makes it so pleasant for the vast majority of people to live here. Very few are immensely rich.
In fact extreme wealth is frowned upon by many.
And even fewer are desperately poor.
There is remarkably little difference between the amount of money a factory worker or bus driver takes home and the pay cheque of a medical doctor.
Both earn just over £2,000 a month.
Sometimes though, it can be hard to explain how we make our money last until pay day.
How on earth can you afford to live here? a colleague visiting from the UK spluttered once.
She had just paid £5 for a pint and was wondering whether she could afford to order a pizza.
I patiently tried to explain that the waiter probably made as much money as her and that the cost of producing that beer was higher than in any other European country.
So, bus drivers, factory workers, doctors, waiters, all make the same? Study hard to the best in high school so you can go to a good college, compete there so you can go to medical school, bust your butt there and go on to years of residency/internship all just so you can make as much as the guy who started working at the pizza place right out of high school? I’m not sure what kind of economic system that is, but that doesn’t strike you as a system begging to be labeled mediocre?
Here’s how another Norwegian describes it:
To be regarded as a good citizen, a sound 'ordinary' person, one must adhere to an unstated but pervasive principle of 'no one is superior to anyone else', as it comes out in subtle kinds of attitudes and behaviour as well as in occasional blatant confrontations. This has definitely had some very positive effects of the sort that limit the gap between rich and poor from growing as fast as in other countries and the provision of most social services to all citizens on a level footing. Merit is thus widely attached to the commoner and the 'average person' (with some unworthy exceptions due to frequent racial attitudes) creating a social structure known as a 'meritocracy'. But there is a shadow side to this... the peculiarly Norwegian cult of mediocrity (as distinct from the Soviet type). In Norway one sees how a 'meritocracy' has slid towards 'mediocracy'. The predominance of the average person - and the common denominator where it ought not to operate - characterises the cult of the mediocre. As in any country, the basic patterns of behaviour and attitude are formed by parents and schooling, are developed and re-enforced by the national media and culture. In Norway there are patently fewer deviations from those norms than in larger states. This has made life harder here than in many other countries for those who step out of line, which includes people of alternative lifestyle, independent thought, originality and also obviously genius.
bosco said:
Never mind infant mortality rates in the US, never mind massive issues with homelessness, poverty, and distribution of income, never mind the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world in the US, never mind greater public access to post-secondary education in many of these highly taxed countries.
Yes, we already examined the flaws in the infant mortality stats, but as to your claims on education...
The OECD report on world education shows the US as second in the world for tertiary education (just behind Canada) with 37% of adults aged 25-64 being educated to the tertiary level. Finland and Sweden come in at 32%, Norway at 28% and Denmark at 27%.
...and regarding poverty I question your claims there also.
I see the CCPA report uses the “share of the children living in the households with income below 50% of the national median” standard. So, using that standard the US is just second worst behind Mexico. Of course, Mexico’s Gross National Income Per Capita is $8,980 and in the US it is $37,750. Hmmm, what about #3 – 10, where do we stand?
% of children Gross National
Country living below 50% Income
1. Mexico 26.2 $8,980
2. USA 22.4 $37,750
3. Italy 20.5 $24,770
4. U. Kingdom 19.8 $27,690
5. Turkey 19.7 $6,710
6. Ireland 16.8 $30,910
7. Canada 15.5 $30,400
8. Poland 15.4 $11,210
9. Australia 12.6 $28,780
10. Greece 12.3 $19,900
So, looking at these numbers I have all sorts of questions about how useful this statistic is. The one foremost in my thoughts is this:
If a kid living in a family in Niagara Falls, New York, USA – with a family income of $18,874 – were to move to Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada with the same income – the cost of living is so much cheaper in Canada that they are no longer in poverty? After all, according to this statistic, they would have to lose $3,674 of income to be “in poverty” across the border. Maybe the reason Canada has a smaller percentage of people living in poverty is because the standard for being impoverished is higher, er, lower.
Regarding wealth distribution. I guess that would be the GINI coefficient that supposedly measures inequalities in distribution in wealth. Of course our Nordic friends are all at the top of the list and the US is way down at 73. But, according to the creators of the coefficient, this sort of thing is on a curve, and it’s best to be somewhere in the middle:
The authors recommend to pursue moderation also as to the distribution of wealth and particularly to avoid the extremes. Both very high egalitarianism and very high inequality cause slow growth. Extreme egalitarianism leads to incentive-traps, free-riding, high operation costs and corruption in the redistribution system, all reducing a country's growth potential.
However, extreme inequality also diminishes growth potential by eroding social cohesion, and increasing social unrest and social conflict, causing uncertainty of property rights. Therefore, public policy should target an 'efficient inequality range'. The authors claim that such efficiency range lies between the values of the Gini coefficients of 0.25 (the inequality value of a typical Northern European country) and 0.40 (slightly lower than that of countries such as China and the USA).
So, we could move more to the center because we are pushing the envelope – by .008 – but it’s nowhere near a “massive issue” as you identified it. And way across the other side of the optimal bubble we are hanging on to, I see the Nordic countries perched precariously to the other end just a smidge away from slipping off into too much egalitarianism.
Well, the pies are all done and the family will be home soon from seeing movies and such, so I’ll have to leave the issue of homelessness and the other issues you raised for some other day.
