An alert reader just sent me, via “Media Matters”, the single dumbest real-life
\nvideo clip that I have ever seen. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Bill O’Reilly is
\na conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He’s known for doing a lot of really obnoxious
\nthings, ranging from sexually harassing at least one female employee, to sending some of
\nhis employees to stalk people who he doesn’t like, to shutting off the microphones of
\nguests on his show if he’s losing an argument. In short, he’s a loudmouthed asshole who
\ngets off on bullying people.<\/p>\n
But that’s just background. As a conservative commentator, he’s been going off on
\nthe evils of Obama’s supposedly socialist healthcare reform. That’s frequently
\ntaken the form of talking about how horrible medical care is under Canada’s
\nsocialized health system. One of his viewers wrote in to him about this. And
\nthe insanity follows.<\/p>\n
The question came from a viewer named Peter from Victoria, BC, who asked: “Has anyone noticed
\nthat life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?”<\/p>\n
Bill’s response:” Well, that’s to be expected Peter, because we have 10 times
\nas many people as you do. That translates to 10 times as many accidents,
\ncrimes, down the line.” Delivered, of course, in BillO’s trademark patronizing
\nstyle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You know, you can, intelligently, make arguments against the Canadian But when it comes the stuff spewing from the pie-holes of people like Unfortunately, I think he probably does actually believe this. See, if you were talking about a statistic that was “number of deaths But that’s not what life expectancy means. Life expectancy is the Suppose that you’ve got a population of 50 people, of uniformly Now, suppose you’ve got 100 people, of uniformly distributed ages. Let’s look at it a different way. Suppose that the average Sure, there are some ways of dying that become more likely in a Of course, people like BillO don’t like it when things are complicated. Much An alert reader just sent me, via “Media Matters”, the single dumbest real-life video clip that I have ever seen. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Bill O’Reilly is a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He’s known for doing a lot of really obnoxious things, ranging from sexually harassing at least one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[71,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-economics","category-bad-statistics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhealth system. For example, in many parts of Canada, there are serious
\nproblems due to a shortage of medical professionals – Doctors, nurses, even
\npharmacists are in short supply. You could<\/em> make the argument that
\nthat’s caused by the Canadian health system, because by eliminating the
\nprofit motive, there’s no motivation for a newly minted professional to
\nset up an office in the middle of nowhere. That’s a reasonable argument.<\/p>\n
\nBillO, we don’t hear the intelligent arguments. Instead, we hear idiocy
\nlike this mind-killing bullshit. I’ve really got to wonder whether he’s
\ndumb enough to actually believe that that makes sense. I’ve always thought
\nthat he was evil, rather than dumb. But watching this, I’ve really got to
\nwonder – who does he think he’s fooling? Does he really think so little
\nof his viewers? Or does he actually believe that this argument makes sense?<\/p>\n
\nBased on other things I’ve heard him say, I think
\nthat while he’s not actually stupid, he is incredibly, willfully ignorant, and
\nabsolutely determined to stay that way. I think that he doesn’t actually
\nunderstand what “life expectancy” means, and given his usual “If I don’t
\nknow it, it’s not worth knowing” attitude, actually looking at a definition
\nto see if it means what he thinks it means is beneath him.<\/p>\n
\nper year”, then his argument would make sense. Death rates are pretty much
\nconstant; the number of deaths is roughly proportional to the population size. So ten times more people implies
\nten times more people dying per year.<\/p>\n
\nmean age of death<\/em> calculated over a population.<\/p>\n
\ndistributed ages. Over time, 20 of them die. Their ages at death are
\n1\/4, 2, 9, 17, 18, 18, 19, 27, 34, 35, 40, 49, 58, 58, 59,
\n60, 63, 64, 80, 98. In the remaining 30 people, you’d say that their
\nlife expectancy was around 40 years. <\/p>\n
\nOver time, 40 of them die, with the same age distribution as the
\nexample above. What’s the life expectancy of the people in the larger
\ngroup? Exactly the same.<\/p>\n
\nlife expectancy of people was significantly dependent on
\npopulation. What would that mean? In increasing order of
\nstupidity:<\/p>\n\n
\nhave dramatically lower life expectancies than people living in
\nToledo Ohio (population around 700,000 in 2007).<\/li>\n
\nlife expectancies, depending on whether you count them as part
\nof the population of a cities metropolitan area, or as populations of
\nseparate towns that just happen to be close to the city.<\/p>\n
\nand Mexico separately<\/em>, and then calculated the life expectancy
\nof people in North America (excluding Central America), the life expectancy
\nof people in North America would be lower<\/em> than the life expectancy of any
\nof the individual countries.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\ndensely populated area. NYC has a higher per-capita crime rate than East Podunk, NY.
\nAnd that does have some effect. High population areas tend to have more pollution,
\nwhich can lead to reduced life expectancies. But on the other hand, high-population
\nareas tend to have better hospitals, more skilled doctors, and shorter time-to-hospital
\nin emergencies, which can all have the opposite effect – increasing life expectancy.
\nAs usual in things like this, working out the total effects of population size on
\nlife expectancy isn’t at all straightforward. In fact, if you look at
\na map of life expectancy in cities of different sizes in developed countries, you’ll find that
\nthere’s no strong relationship. (For example, in NYC in the year 2000, the average life expectancy
\nwas 78.6 years – 6 years longer than the overall American average. Population
\ncertainly isn’t hurting NYC. But if you look at life expectancy over time in NYC,
\nplotted against population, you’ll see a mess with no correlation.)<\/p>\n
\nbetter to just make shit up, spout nonsensical garbage, and shout really loud
\nwhenever anyone tries to tell you that you’re wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"