Lies, Damn Lies, and the Usual Lying Statistical Claims Not Based in Facts . . .

Daily Mail in an article about the potential problems facing returning Afghan vets (there's no data about actual cases, just speculation about potential down the road problems) quotes a hoary old statistic that may have been close to the truth at one point in the early 80s, but here as we quickly approach the second decade of the 21st century is utterly ludicrous.

In the U.S., it is estimated that 44 per cent of all homeless people are Vietnam veterans.

No, 44% of homeless are not Vietnam Vets, that's absurd on the face of it. I live in Santa Monica, "Home of the Homeless", and I can tell you that the vast majority of homeless are not old enough to have served in Vietnam (though plenty claim to have, though I guess enough have been busted on their accounts of being in Vietnam that they tend to update their tales of harrowing experiences that inexorably forced them to a life on the streets to the 1st Gulf War). The kind of PTSD inducing combat that might leave somebody forever scarred largely ended by 1973, and we were completely out of Vietnam by 1975, so unless you were born before 1955, it's impossible for you to have experienced combat in Vietnam. 44% of homeless people in the United States are not over the age of 54, and of those that are homeless and old enough to have served in Vietnam, nowhere near 100% of those folks did.

After some quick googling, I can't find any study that states such a high number, for current populations of homeless (again, 25 years ago, a number like that would seem plausible, but not now). Seems the last big federal government study about homelessness was done by HUD in 1996 (and updated in 1999), and even 13 years ago, homeless veterans constituted less than 25% of overall homeless, and in other studies from 13 years ago, even then Vietnam Vets were around 40% of the total of male homeless people (women veterans rarely end up homeless, interestingly), and in the intervening 13 years, I'm certain there's been attrition to that number (this table from HUD is of people using their services, but they speculate based on other surveys that there numbers are in line with the total figures)

If I threw out a statistic claiming that 20% of British Seamen suffered from rickets, I bet you could go back through the historical record and find a time when 20% of limey sailors suffered all sorts of wonderful diseases, but that's not the case now, and if I were using those old statistics to make a claim about the scope of a future problem, then I'd hope anyone reading would laugh off my ridiculous suggestion.

And as far as the gist of the article, I'm not understanding why it matters whether British Veterans get their free health care from the NHS or from the military. What difference does it make? Either way, the government is picking up the tab, and a psychiatrist is a psychiatrist, whether they work on a military base, or in an NHS run clinic. If anything, an NHS based service should be more convenient, and more easily accessible than if veterans could only seek care from military specialist.

This shouldn't be viewed as a problem at all, unless NHS doctors exhibit anti-military bias (which wouldn't be surprising), and the general service at NHS clinics was sub-standard (again, wouldn't be at all surprising).

Combat is traumatic, always has been, always will be, societies have differed in how to help combatants to recover from their experiences, and social mores have sent troops into conflicts with differing skill sets in how to process their experiences to begin with. It's inevitable that combat leaves a mark, it's not inevitable that it leads to an inability to reintergrate with society at large, and most veterans have found a way in which to carry on with their lives and function even with the memories of what they did and what they faced. We need to honor those that defend our freedoms, and give them all the help they need, but we shouldn't be so quick to lump all combat veterans into the 'ticking time bomb' stereotype that pervades Hollywood and the rest of media, cause history and experience shows that stereotype as being false and pernicious.

Meaningless Statistics Lead to Meaningless and Misleading Conclusions

The latest meaningless statistic floating about is the 'sudden' drop in the U.S.A's ranking in life expectancy.

It's a very misleading number, for a number of reasons, but this is being used by advocates of more nannyism to promote more nannyism.

First of all, 77.9 ain't bad for life expectancy, but even that number is just being pulled out of thin air. The very top is 83.5 for Andorra, which isn't particularly different in quantity. If someone dies before their 84th birthday, do you say they died too soon? Do you think someone who dies before blowing out 78 candles was stricken too early? Didn't think so. Anything past 75 is a full life. Some people pack more living in their years than others, but basically, any healthy years past the age of 75 is pure gravy (and death before 75 is too soon).

But the number is still a lie. One of the bigger components dragging down the USA's number compared to other developed (and under-developed nations) is the way we count infant mortality. We count 'live births' differently than the rest of the world, and babies that would never be delivered elsewhere, get delivered here. That alone could account for the difference between the USA and France, UK, or Germany. We have the highest infant mortality rate because we count every infant. Europe doesn't, a lot of cases that they consider 'stillbirths' are full term or close to full term babies. Their lower rate of premies isn't necessarily cause of better neo-natal care, but because their view of 'viability' is completely different, and they are much quicker to abort fetuses for medical reasons (even in the 2nd and 3rd trimester).

The European view on this is more 'pragmatic', which makes comparing health statistics impossible when there's such a huge cultural difference in this area of medicine (the wiki explains the difference succinctly) pure bunk. I bet if we were to count all women who enter the 3rd trimester and then compared survivability one year out, suddenly the European mortality rate would look worse if not comparable to the USA's. But they don't keep that statistic, so there's no way to do the comparison.

I haven't seen a single article mentioning the new US ranking that brings up the huge differences in reporting on infant mortality, though they do mention how our 'high' infant mortality rate factors into our lower life expectancy at birth.

Also, how accurate is life expectancy at birth? It's not outside the realm of possibility that some children born in 2004 may end up living in some form or another well beyond 'natural' life spans. Read enough sci-fi, and you can start to believe that within 75 years downloading of consciousness into a neural net, or transferring consciousness from an older body to a younger body is an achievable goal. Look where technology was 75 years ago, and given the exponential rate at which certain technologies advance, the possibility that real life extension (turning life spans into centuries rather than decades), might be possible. There are a few non-nut doctors out their who are working on 'curing' aging.

And if aging does get 'cured' I bet there will be plenty of Americans lined up to get cured. So the real average life expectancy for an American kid born in 2004 could end up being well beyond 77.9, if the aging cure ends up not being ridiculously expensive, then a significant portion (at least significant enough to greatly alter the average) of Americans born in 2004 might still be around in 2400.

The mind boggles, but I'd rather think about that than use some dumb easily manipulated statistic that relies on governments to report on themselves to tell us that we're 'slipping' compared to the rest of the world.

I've already heard some folks use this as another cudgel with which to beat us into submission on the notion that nationalized and socialized medicine is superior.

Yet I don't see anyone looking at how many of those countries ahead of us in life expectancy also 'lead' us in percentage of the population who smokes. Maybe we just need to smoke more. Seems to work for Japan.

And one more thing, another thing needlessly brought up in this article is the disparity between 'black' and 'white' life expectancies. You want to 'cure' that disparity, then legalize drugs. Much of the disparity is due to the violence and incarceration targeting black men associated with the drug trade. Make the drugs legal, and the street crime, and disparity in death rate will evaporate (though some extra OD deaths may occur, I would guess that this increase would be less significant than the much greater drop in deaths due to illicit drug trade related gun play).

So these are my conclusions, if you want the USA to climb up this chart again, legalize drugs, game our infant mortality statistics the same way Europe does, and don't over-regulate biomedical research. Do those things, and we'll be number one (or at least number eleven) again in no time.