On Aug 17, 2007, at 9:24 PM, Paul wrote:
> To be concrete lets take just one example - the new immigrants.
On the face of it, why should immigrants boost the city's health profile? They're poor, displaced, often solitary or separated from families, in shitty jobs living densely in poor neighborhoods, and either invisible to or scorned by the native society.
> As I said, new immigrants and their dependents have a different health
> profile (for now) than native born groups (they also have lots of
> other
> differences like drug use prevalence and homicide victim rates that
> feed
> into life expectancy and other things going on now in NYC).
> [Sadly, one
> fears they were "allowed" in partly for this reason.]
Was there some gatekeeper that made this decision?
> The departure of the native born working class has also meant that
> their
> elderly parents are now more likely to leave NYC
The age profile of NYC is little different from the U.S.: median age, 35.8 vs. U.S. 36.4; under 5 years, 7.4% vs 7.0% U.S.; 11.9% over 65 vs. 12.1% U.S.
And the city is poorer and darker than the national average by a significant margin - yet we live longer. That shouldn't be. Why? And the national mythology, to quote Thomas Jefferson, is that "large cities are pestilential." Pollution and stress are supposed to kill us. They don't. Why?
> To me the point of the article was comparing NYC favorably with
> other US
> *cities* (the article said so in the first para).
It said that at the end of the first paragraph, but the bulk of it was comparing urban to suburban and rural stats. The rest of the article referred to the end of the urban health disadvantage and cited a study of different neighborhoods in Atlanta.
> willing reporters, such as this one
I know Clive fairly well, and he's not a credulous hack. He's a hardworking, careful, and knowledgeable guy.
I detect some of the leftish impulse to deny that any improvement is ever possible in life.
Doug