7 ms·
>>> Life expectancy has been increasing as people left the countryside for the cities. It's a comment on the causation here - if 'moving to cities' caused an i
by DuskStar 7y ago
>>> Life expectancy has been increasing as people left the countryside for the cities.
It's a comment on the causation here - if 'moving to cities' caused an increase in life expectancy in general you'd expect people living in cities to always have higher life expectancy than people in the countryside, and that's what my comment was refuting. Instead, it seems that life expectancy has been rising at the same time as people have been moving to cities, but moving to cities is not what caused the general life expectancy changes.
EDIT: Also, people have been moving to cities for millenia, it's just only been the past few centuries where those cities stopped being massive deathtraps and thus actually started growing.
- icebraining 7y agoMoving to current cities may still be what's causing life expectancy to increase, even if moving to cities in the past didn't. Cities weren't held constant.
- DuskStar 7y agoOf course! But I'd still guess that it's not some intrinsic property of cities, and that a large part of the difference would be explained by income differentials (or job differences - no chance of getting crushed by a tractor in Times Square).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 7y agoIf job differences are not intrinsic to cities, what is?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DuskStar 7y agoDensity, maybe?
- icebraining 7y agoYeah, and I'd say those differences in density inevitably cause differences in types of jobs. It's second order, but still intrinsic.