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The potential damage of climate change and rise in mental health issues and gun violence stick out to me, but on average I do agree with you that we live longer

The potential damage of climate change and rise in mental health issues and gun violence stick out to me, but on average I do agree with you that we live longer and probably have higher quality of life now. Out of curiosity, do you think that's more a result of companies willfully choosing to reduce profits to be more ethical or because things are generally more regulated these days?

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> rise in mental health issues and gun violence stick out to me https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/most-americans-incorrectly-think-gun-homicides-have-gotten-worse-not-better/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/most-amer... Also note that the small uptick the last couple of years is closely aligned with the opioid epidemic, and even then is still basically flat since the turn of the century and down significantly from the peak in the early 1990s. Still possibly an example of companies choosing profits over lives, but the companies in this case are the drug companies.
- wybiral 7y ago
  Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though in the midst of massive lobbying efforts to prevent gun control regulations (but also significant increases due to the war on drugs and generally elevated crime rates). There still has been a noticeable recent uptick [1]. And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research. [2] Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths. PS: I'm not on the "ban all the guns" side of the debate or anything. My point was just that corporations most certainly do profit from death or violence even today and the main thing stopping them is regulation or consumer backlash. Otherwise their sole existence is to maximize profit. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-deaths-levels-cdc-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-death... [2] https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-to-stifle-gun-violence-research https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-...
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density. > Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths. It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers. > And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research. Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political. Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives. But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing. The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution. Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes. Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum. But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science. We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> rise in mental health issues and gun violence stick out to me https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/most-americans-incorrectly-think-gun-homicides-have-gotten-worse-not-better/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/most-amer... Also note that the small uptick the last couple of years is closely aligned with the opioid epidemic, and even then is still basically flat since the turn of the century and down significantly from the peak in the early 1990s. Still possibly an example of companies choosing profits over lives, but the companies in this case are the drug companies.

wybiral 7y ago
Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though in the midst of massive lobbying efforts to prevent gun control regulations (but also significant increases due to the war on drugs and generally elevated crime rates). There still has been a noticeable recent uptick [1]. And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research. [2] Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths. PS: I'm not on the "ban all the guns" side of the debate or anything. My point was just that corporations most certainly do profit from death or violence even today and the main thing stopping them is regulation or consumer backlash. Otherwise their sole existence is to maximize profit. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-deaths-levels-cdc-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-death... [2] https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-to-stifle-gun-violence-research https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-...
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density. > Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths. It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers. > And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research. Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political. Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives. But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing. The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution. Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes. Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum. But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science. We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.