Re: NYers living longer than other Americans - who knew?
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