Subtleties of life expectancy
12th May 2011
I’d be more impressed with ‘economists’ like this one if, just once, they supported something that wasn’t part of the market basket of contemporary ‘progressive’ policies.
And, of course, economists — once they wander into the political field — are as inclined (some would say, more inclined) to commit the fallacy of Unwarranted Aggregation. For example:
Think about that when arguing that the richest country in the world can’t afford Social Security and Medicare starting at age 65 because “everyone” in this country has seen their life expectancy increase.
The problem with this is that ‘the richest country in the world’ can’t afford anything, because ‘the richest country in the world’ doesn’t have one giant bank account that can be tapped for whatever Cool Idea is the latest fad. That’s the tedious trick that most social ‘reformers’ use so often that it’s worn grooves in everybody’s brains and so is no longer even noticed, much less protested. Calling a country ‘rich’ is just a metaphor, a way of summarizing a technical statistical aggregation so that it can be compared with other technical statistical aggregations; using it as if it were a Real Thing that can serve as a foundation for a policy recommendation is the sort of Stupid Mistake that a Real Scientist tries to avoid — which is why when Real Scientists speak, what they say is hedged around with cautions and qualifiers.
Any purported scientist that says something definite without immediately following it with ‘But of course you have to bear in mind that…’ is almost certainly talking out of his ass, and so said opinion is to be accorded no more deference than one would give to, oh, a newspaper story (i.e. not very much).