Re: Human population evolving...

On Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:56:46 -0500, James Beck wrote:

On Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:40:23 -0600, Garamond Lethe
<cartographical@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 03 Dec 2011 06:57:49 +0000, Mike Dworetsky wrote:

Garamond Lethe wrote:
On Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:52:36 -0800, Boikat wrote:

On Dec 2, 6:20 pm, dav...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
chris thompson <chris.linthomp...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:





...and dragging the rest of us along with it, whether we want it
or not.

There are more cases of pertussis this year than there have been
for over a decade. Many of these are apparently (note uncertainty
there)
due to the unreasonable fear that childhood vaccines are unsafe.
With more middle-school kids around who have not been vaccinated
against pertussis, it is inevitable that people like teachers will
bring the disease home to infants too young to be vaccinated:

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/315319

Yeah, a case of cultural evolution driving biological evolution, I
would suggest.

How long will it be before the US sees an outbreak of diphtheria?
Before you scoff, recall that the Russian Federation- which used
to be a model of childhood vaccination (ok, at bayonet-point,
true) had a multi-year outbreak of diptheria and thousands of kids
died.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00022128.htm

What will the world be like with 8 or 9 or 10 billion?-

You must think humans in general are too stupid solve a large
population problem.

Based on our track record at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 billion that's a
pretty good bet.

My option is GM grains and livestock (including cloned "meat").

Kinda like trying to put out fire with kerosene, yes?

What's yours?

More literate young girls and women in poorer countries, more
politically empowered young girls and women in poorer countries.
Reduction of infant mortality.

When that happens birth rates go down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

[Speaking of, it looks like the US is currently #46 in terms of
infant mortality. When it comes to prenatal care we're still getting
our asses kicked by Wallis and Futuna, Gurnsey, Liechtenstein, the
Czech Republic, Malta, Anguilla, Macau and Singapore. I'm too lazy
to look it up, but I expect all those countries have higher tax rates
than we do. Woo hoo! YOU-ESS-AY! YOU-ESS-AY!]

Actually, many of them have lower taxes. Guernsey is one of the
Channel Islands, and is a tax haven where wealthy people try to get
residency because of the low taxation. Liechtenstein similarly,
though more a place where the rich hide their money in secret bank
accounts.

It has far more to do with ignorance than taxes...



Ok, now I'm curious. You're probably right about the tax haven
countries. I wonder what the rest look like.

Taking the countries represented in the first graph here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world

in order of declining personal income tax rates as a percentage of
income (completely ignoring corporate taxes for the moment), vs. rank in
infant mortality rate.

Inf. Inf. Personal Income Tax Mort. Mort. Rank
(highest to Rank.
Rate lowest)
--------------------------------------------
24 4.44 Belgium 15 3.99 Germany
8 3.33 France
62 7.86 Hungary
3 2.75 Sweden
23 4.42 Austria 42 5.51 Italy
9 3.47 Finland
14 3.79 Czech Rep. 53 6.80 Poland
140 25.78 Turkey
22 4.34 Denmark 17 4.21 Spain
38 5.16 Greece 27 4.73
Netherlands 54 6.84 Slovak Rep.
11 3.58 Norway 30 4.78 Portugal
26 4.56 Luxemburg 32 4.85 UK 36
5.04 Canada 16 4.18 Switzerland 46
6.26 US
7 3.23 Iceland
29 4.75 Australia 37 5.05 Ireland
33 4.92 New Zealand
112 18.42 Mexico
21 4.26 S. Korea

Looks like I was wrong. Just eyeballing it I'd say there was a negative
correlation between tax rates and infant mortality,
but the US is so much of an outlier that the correlation can't be used
to account for it.

Tax revenue as a fraction of GDP for most countries is available from
the Heritage Foundation. Also, using the raw infant mortality numbers is
misleading. On a country-basis, infant mortality is lognormal. A
multiple regression of the log of infant mortality on the tax burden,
and dummy variables for whether each country's economy is industrial,
oil-based, or less-developed (emerging markets show up in the regression
constant), as currently assigned by MSCI, and using a heterskedasticity
consistent covariance matrix gives:

n = 173 Const Tax Indust Oil LDC
3.10 -0.02 -0.93 -0.90 1.14
tstat: 19.50 -4.25 -7.36 -5.51 9.45 adjR^2 = 0.75 df=
168.00

Infant Mortality - UN Tax Revenue/GDP - Heritage Foundation (2008)
Development categories: Morgan Stanley Capital International

Using tax and ln(infant mortality) as regressors, Logit correctly
predicts that the US is in the group of industrialized nations. At 6.8
per thousand, the US has achieved about 97% of the best infant mortality
result reported globally, so the US is not an outlier in overall
outcomes.

Where we really stand out as bad is in cost for those outcomes. Our
healthcare system consumes almost twice as much of our GDP as say,
France's. Despite being the most expensive, last year, the Commonwealth
Fund ranked the quality of US healthcare last among similar countries.
Part of that is probably because such a large fraction of our population
receives low quality care, so the average quality is low.

We don't get much bang for our buck.

The trick to enjoying talk.origins lies in provoking people smarter than
you are into teaching you something.

Thank you.

Do you have a link for the tax and mortality numbers? I'm not finding
them after a cursory look at the Heritage site.

.

Relevant Pages

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