so, come up with the numbers for Canada and Australia. I would expect that they are higher on some measures and lower on others.
On the infant mortality numbers, if you count marginally viable babies as live births, you use heroic measures to save them and a higher percentage of them die, you adversely affect the life expectancy numbers. If you don't use heroic measures and deem the extreme preemies lost causes so that they die, as in many other countries, they count as miscarriages rather than live births. That's what I was getting at. No big mystery.
guyy, I didn't understand what you were talking about with the Irish emigration and the potato famine.
And I agree that it's possible to dispute the direction of causality between culture and government, but in general, over the long term people get the government they really want. It's a revealed preference, to use the economic term.
My point about socialized services in Cuba was that those services aren't necessarily the sign of an enlightened society, given that they were originated by Bismarck as a way to keep the masses quiescent and to stave off demands for democracy.
Last edited by loquitur; 03-30-2008 at 01:04 PM..
Reason: Automerged Doublepost
|