Life Expectancy and Capitalism

[microbet]

@MysteryConman

Anti-capitalists are not criticizing the production of goods and services, or the exchange of those goods and services, or competition. Those things exist outside of capitalism.

This is part of the very post you are replying to.

[ChrisV]

@microbet

This is part of the very post you are replying to.

How is this relevant? There remains the question “which goods and services should we produce?”.

[microbet]

The ones that people buy in the market. Exchange of goods and services. Competition.

Like SensiblePerson said and MysteryConman was talking about - a command economy is not an essential component of socialism and a free market is not a sufficient condition to be capitalism (and often it really isn’t part of capitalism).

Command economies are very inefficient though for the reason you suggest. A free market is a way to solve the very difficult problem of figuring out what people want, especially when it isn’t something obvious like health care.

In Germany the board of directors of a company with more than 2000 people has to have 50% worker representation. If that were 100% would it mean there were no free market?

[ChrisV]

As far as I’m concerned, if I can allocate my own money to creating a company with the expectation of making profit, it’s fundamentally capitalism. But obviously this is part of the problem, “capitalism” and “socialism” are more signifiers these days than well-defined terms. Of course all systems have elements of both, even the US.

[microbet]

@ChrisV

Of course all systems have elements of both, even the US.

I guess you’re grunching because basically everyone has said that.

But as far as you are concerned, when did capitalism start? Markets are certainly pre-historic. Lots of people talk about the beginnings of Capitalism as like the Dutch East India Company (something that was mentioned up thread).

[Jalfrezi]

@CaffeineNeeded

@Jalfrezi

it’s a commonly held fallacy that people used to die much younger

this still isn’t true and is way over correcting the mistake you identified. People over 90 have tripled since 1980 in the USA for example.

Life expectancy increasing by a few years does not invalidate what I said.

People often have the idea that hundreds of years ago reaching sixty was some kind of rare event.

[KSR]

I saw this or a similar article and then a few days later I was with my dad when he was having a heart attack. He was in a ton of pain and could barely walk into the ER. They let him know it’s a heart attack and they need to put a stent in. I heard stent and then remembered that article. There is no way I was going to be like “hey guys I heard stents don’t actually do anything.” He had the procedure and is doing well now. I have always been curious though. If he says no to the stent does he just have terrible chest pains and hang out at the hospital until the meds start working?

[Jalfrezi]

People just love to say that socialism means an overwhelming government inducing gross inefficiencies leading to bankruptcy, and their data points for this immaculate observation are the USSR (widespread famine at the time of the revolution) and Cuba (crippling economic embargo from massive hostile neighbour and natural trading partner).

I actually have slightly more sympathy with conservatives who really do believe this narrative because they’ve been brainwashed than centrists who know it’s bullshit but use it as a cloak to hide their fear of losing the ability to assert their greed and selfishness.

[mosdef]

@microbet

they also killed people who didn’t buy their stuff or tried to sell their own stuff

I feel like maybe we should gather up all the copies of Wealth of Nations and burn them before this stuff gets in the hands of tech CEOs. The don’t have the humanity to realize this would be evil, but they would certainly find a way to operationalize this approach with machine learning.

[Jalfrezi]

@CaffeineNeeded

The point was that jar’s position about how it was a myth was wrong

What I said was (bolded for emphasis)
.

@Jalfrezi

improvements in infant mortality rates account for much of that (it’s a commonly held fallacy that people used to die much younger)

As you can see from the excellent charts posted by @bobman0330 the bulk of gains are accounted for by much improved mortality rates in the young.

I get (and also suffer from) the enjoyment of arguing about things with people, especially about things as interesting as this, but at least check someone’s saying exactly what you’re assuming they’re saying first.

[mosdef]

@SensiblePerson

THANK YOU for introducing equity into this discussion. One problem with using averages at the level of nations is that it obscures differences, in particular along wealth lines (as noted) and racial lines.

There is actually tons of great research on how mortality rates and mortality improvement vary across groups. Commercially driven actuarial research on mortality is motivated by wanting to price the risks properly for different groups of people and, where possible, charge people different prices.

The evolution of breaking down mortality rates is pretty interesting. You start off with some very obvious stuff like age curves - mortality rates vary by how old the person is (duh). After that it becomes more a practice of mixing intuition with data mining to figure out how mortality rates vary by other factors. Some interesting stuff:

• Gender has been used as a major determinant of mortality for at least a century. If you go back a hundred years, you start to run into data challenges obviously but you can find pretty good information about age and gender at death in public records. Because female mortality rates were much lower than male mortality rates in the 20th century this was useful information. It’s going to be extremely interesting to see how the evolution is society’s thinking about gender impacts these models. I’m not sure that we’ll even be allowed to collect that data in 10 years.

• For the 2nd part of last century smoking provided a ton of insight into mortality rates. Crude rules of thumb included stuff like smoker mortality rates were double the rates of non smokers for example. With smoking rates coming down that’s a less reliable indicator.

• One of the coolest insights of the past 20 years or so is that a major, major indicator of mortality rates is postal code. To the extent that, if you are allowed to pick one single data point other than age to use to guess a person’s mortality rate, then postal code is the best choice. It’s actually quite an indictment of our society yet again that this is true. Where you live carries with it so many correlations to wealth, lifestyle, access to health care, access to good food, etc. etc. etc. The entirety of the Western world is kind of built as gated communities without gates.

• None of these points even address the wildly speculative endeavor of guessing how mortality rates will change in the future. Is the past rate of improvement a good indicator? Is there a maximum age at which people can reasonably be expected to live no matter what technology is developed? These matters are debated intensely by very knowledgeable people with access to powerful tools. It’s a big open question.

[Melkerson]

@KSR

I saw this or a similar article and then a few days later I was with my dad when he was having a heart attack. He was in a ton of pain and could barely walk into the ER. They let him know it’s a heart attack and they need to put a stent in. I heard stent and then remembered that article. There is no way I was going to be like “hey guys I heard stents don’t actually do anything.” He had the procedure and is doing well now. I have always been curious though. If he says no to the stent does he just have terrible chest pains and hang out at the hospital until the meds start working?

The “stents don’t do anything”, as you put it, only applies to people who are stable (i.e. without symptoms). If he was actually having a heart attack, then it sounds like he wasn’t stable and then it doesn’t apply. Even for patients with angina, they are useful:

The trial did show, however, that among patients with coronary artery disease who also had symptoms of angina — chest pain caused by restricted blood flow to the heart — treatment with invasive procedures, such as stents or bypass surgery, was more effective at relieving symptoms and improving quality of life.

[clovis8]

These capitalism anti-capitalism discussions always go down the same paths for the same reasons.

Anti-capitalists need to understand they are proposing radical societal level change and follow Sagan’s maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Too often, anti-capitalists just assume the premise of their extraordinary claims and get mad at anyone questioning them.

None of this is to say anti-capitalism is wrong. I’m simply arguing that advocates need to understand the extraordinary nature of their argument and start from that premise in all discussions. This includes defining the terms.

[Jalfrezi]

I’d hope that most posters here would agree it’s not an extraordinary claim that capitalism is a system which fails too many people in disastrous ways.

[Smacc_25]

I don’t like the word Anti-Capitalist.

Would you agree that capitalism breeds Curruption, therefore corrupt practices thrive under capitalism?

[mosdef]

@Smacc_25

capitalism breeds Curruption

The question is not “if” this is true, its to what extent other systems or institutions within a generally capitalist system can mitigate corruption.

[clovis8]

Was just typing this nearly identical.

[Smacc_25]

@mosdef

a generally capitalist system can mitigate corruption

Seems like both parties in the American system enjoy the participation in the Curruption as they do little to mitigate the Curruption from the corporations and have allowed the Curruption to flourish.

No wonder I’m on team burn it down.

[Trolly]

Not what he was saying.

[clovis8]

Agreed but part of the issue is so much of this discussion happens in the context of the US system. Seems like if we are really wanting to parse out if capitalism is a failure as a system we need to examine the best example of the system.