[extropy-chat] Extinctions

[Lee Corbin]

Damien writes

> > I mean that you cannot compare Luxembourg and Brazil, nor,
> > really the U.S. and Europe. Too much lumping!  The "U.S."
> > and "Europe" are each just too diverse internally.
> 
> The US comes out unfavorably in comparison with almost every other First
> World country.  And we have no monopoly on diversity; Canada has plenty
> of immigrants, various European countries have more and more.

Now if you were to tell me that whites in the 60-80 percentile
of SES in *Canada* or *England* or *Germany* showed up favorably
against American whites in the 60-80 percentile SES in the U.S.,
I'd be interested.

> Anyway, I believe that even if you compare white Americans to white
> Europeans or Canadians we still die sooner while spending twice as
> much money.

Well :-)  so far, you have your hunches and I have mine.

Ten years ago or so I heard an amazing fact on radio one day.
"Family values" were making a comeback among the university
age population!  A study of Cal Berkeley showed that all the
Pat Robertson type family values were being accepted by much
greater numbers of undergraduates.

It took me some time before it occurred to me what was going on.
Berkeley at that time had just become majority Chinese-American.
Oh.  Duh.

But the lesson is very clear: we should be very wary of grouped
stats. The more that other variables are controlled for, clearly
the better.

Lee