Ugh, statistical charts like the one above make my teeth itch.
It used to be that a goodly portion of that chart (I imagine like 80% of it) would have just been labeled “natural causes” or “old age”, but nowadays we qualify most of those deaths into categories for good, epistemological reasons. When they are clumped into a chart like that they give a skewed view of what people will UNEXPECTEDLY die from.
You look at it and see the 30% “heart disease” number and you picture a middle-aged man clutching his chest and collapsing at work, but that’s not true: only about 6% of people under 60 actually have a potentially fatal heart disease or condition – and far fewer actually die of it. Conversely, if you are over 75, you are about 80% likely to have a diagnosed heart condition and about as likely to eventually die from it.
It would be great to see that chart re-worked to track deaths of people younger than 60 or younger than 50. I imagine that with the exception of “terrorism”, the Googled causes would line up reasonably well with the actual causes of death.
Yes. This is essentially the point I was making. Gates’s is viewing this like a robot. People know they’re going to die. The emotional impact of heart disease is simply not the same as “gunned down while on vacation in Vegas.”
It’s like a Star Trek episode, where Spock doesn’t understand why the humans aren’t as concerned with losing 2 years of life at age 78 as they are with losing 40 years of life by being stabbed to death at 30.
Also can one not both treat disease and address gun violence? Once again I have this crazy idea that other countries have done so.
MikeJ
2816
Better charts do indeed use quality-adjusted life years.
Sharpe
2817
Excellent and fairly in depth Ezra Klein interview with Elizabeth Warren .
Here’s a sample:
" Ezra Klein
Tell me about your theory of how power sequences…
Elizabeth Warren
Here’s my theory: It starts now. That’s what true grassroots building is about. Green New Deal. More and more people are in that fight and say that matters to me. Medicare-for-all, that fight that matters to me. Student loan debt cancellation, 43 million Americans who would be affected by my proposal there. That matters to me. 12 million kids who could be affected by child care and universal pre-K for all our 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. That matters to me.
As those issues over the next year and a quarter get clearer, sharper, they’re issues worth fighting for, and issues where we truly have leadership on it, have people out there knocking doors over it. That’s where the legislative agenda starts. It starts a year and a half before the election. Then, the idea is to take that energy from the election and take it straight into Congress.
For example, I have got a plan to just attack this opioid crisis head-on…"
Hey, as a person with small kids and student loans, I like Warren’s focus. I would gladly vote for her.
I’m fine with student loan forgiveness, as long as they pay me cash for the loans I paid off. With a reasonable rate of interest.
That’s a recipe for never fixing anything. One can always argue I had to suffer, so why shouldn’t everyone else.
Menzo
2821
Does Warren have any forward-looking answers to address why we need to be talking about student loan forgiveness in the first place? Or is it just a single payoff today and everyone starting college next year is out of luck?
I know a sort of middle of the road Democrat and she told me she couldn’t support Warren because she knows kids who “did the right thing and worked really hard to pay for themselves through college” and it would be unfair to those people if you forgave others’ loans.
It’s endemic to American culture. ‘All about me.’ We’re little more than a collection of self centered assholes.
I agree. People should stop whining about their student loans. It’s not all about them.
Yes, she wants to make college free at public universities. Which strikes me as perfectly sensible.
I mean, when they propose raising the earned income tax credit or improving the personal exemption, you don’t hear people saying that’s fine as long as they pay me back for last year, even though some people will demonstrably win by joining the workforce at the right time.
No, the recipe for fixing it is “I was injured by this the same way everyone else was, so make me whole along with everyone else.”
Oh, I feel your suffering, trust me. I’m just wondering if both you and I need to cut off our own legs, to square things with war veterans. Fair is fair, right? Why should we get a free ride?
Edit: We can’t ever change anything if changing it produces winners and losers is pretty stupid as an approach to public policy.
The point of progress is to make things better for those that come after us. Just because I got fucked out of my 20s doesn’t mean everyone else needs to suffer through the same.
KevinC
2830
I just barely paid off the bulk of my student loans. I’ve been slamming everything I could into them for years now. Would it suck if student loan forgiveness became a thing just as I paid them off? Yeah, not gonna lie, it’s a pretty crappy feeling. Does it still need to happen? Yes, it does, for all the same reasons I’ve railed about it while I’ve been paying them off.
“I had to suffer, so every student after me for all eternity must suffer as well” just doesn’t cut it. Student loan forgiveness is already going to be expensive, trying to go back years and give people money back for what they already paid off? Where do you make the cutoff? If you go back five years, then you fuck over the people who paid them off six years ago. Where is a feasible cutoff?
The price of education and healthcare are the real problems that need fixing. Debt from those stops being a problem if they become affordable. But that requires taking on huge industries instead of throwing money at a one time temporary fix.
Sure forgive some debt but it doesn’t mean anything without dealing with the problems that created the debt in the first place.
Free public university tuition pretty much covers that.
