I'm currently reading Jacob Hacker's & Paul Pierson's "Winner-Take-All
Politics" which documents very large shifts in income and wealth in the US from
the 1970s to the present. The richest one percent of the population saw their
income rise by nearly 260%. Populations below the top one percent also saw
their incomes rise but by far lesser amounts. I've only read about a third of
the book, but it's already very evident that one of the major causes of the
rich getting richer is the increasing connectedness between wealth and politics
in the US -- i.e. I'll help you get elected if you fight to clear out some of
the rules that prevent me from getting richer. What Hacker and Pierson seem to
be saying is that politicians who are elected to serve the common good have in
many cases become special interest lobbyists.
I don't know what this has to do with the place of the US in global infant
mortality, but I'd be willing to bet that the children of the rich have a much
better chance of surviving than the children of the poor.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Spencer" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 1:25 PM
Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: U.S. 30th in global infant mortality
>
> Mike G. wrote:
>
>> Further evidence of the downward drift.
>
>>> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5A30PM20091104
>>>
>>> U.S. 30th in global infant mortality
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> "One in 8 births in the United States were born preterm, compared
>>> with 1 in 18 births in Ireland and Finland," added the report,
>
> Not enough info in the forwarded Reuters piece to infer much of
> anything. What's the cause of so many pre-term births? Smoking has
> declined in the referenced period:
>
>>> "The percentage of preterm births in the United States has risen 36
>>> percent since 1984."
>>>
>>> Smoking and alcohol abuse can lead to pre-term birth but so can
>>> fertility treatments resulting in multiple births.
>
> and big-bore fertility tech is expensive, not for the statistical
> masses. Is the US way high on booze intake? Street drugs?
> Prescription drug pandemic? American generic angst is more
> foetus-hostile than Finnish generic depression?
>
> So something is there, yes, but it isn't clear just what.
>
> Tongue in cheek, one might say that, in the brave new century of the
> victorious capitalist reincarnation of Homo Economicus, in the
> interest of efficiency, babies are getting made by trying to make 9
> women pregnant for one month and then the team is downsized to 6, 7 or
> 8 participants.
>
> BTW, entertaining piece by Douglas Coupland in Saturday's Toronto
> Globe & Mail, "A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years". 45
> quotable squibbs with attendant marginalia.
>
> "The middle class is over. It's not coming back." Considering that
> every Saturday G&M for a decade or more has had numerous ads each week
> for machine shops, tool and die works, machine tool companies,
> precision fabricating shops and the like being auctioned off, I
> believe it. The businesses, large and small, that make the tools and
> machines for production are, so to speak, the liver of the middle
> class. The liver is large, largely unnoticed, robust and you can even
> live with half of it excised. But a defunct or moribund liver is
> immanent death. The loss of some consumer product companies is bad
> but the loss of the machine tool industry is catastrophe.
>
>
> - Mike
>
> --
> Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
> /V\
> [email protected] /( )\
> http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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