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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (347998)	8/22/2007 2:38:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573849

No its not just a nitpick. Small babies in some countries get counted as dead infants, in others they get treated more like as if there was a miscarriage. The stats compare apples and oranges. I'd like to see adjustments (measuring the US by the other standard or other countries by the US standard) but until we have that data, we can't conclude too much from just looking at the numbers. If it isn't done, it is just an attempt to discredit an argument without making one. I made an argument, and its a correct and reasonable one. The data doesn't tell us what its claimed to tell us. Not knowing exactly what it does tell us, doesn't make my point wrong, irrelevant, or unimportant. My point isn't that the claim that US has a higher real infant mortality rate is wrong, its that it is unsubstantiated. I don't have to prove the contrary point to show that the claim lacks substantiation. "I did point out a study done that adjusting for differences in accidents and violence rates in the US, the US life expectancy was above average for developed countries." Did it adjust the other countries data for the same factors? It adjusted for the fact that those factors are overall higher in the US than in the other countries considered. I didn't see the raw data, so I don't know the full list of countries that where considered. Also I don't know specifically if they include suicide in their adjustments, although it might reasonably be counted under violence (to self). In any case Scandinavia is a small part of the European population. When you start throwing out data points, you need to be consistent. Which is exactly the point you seem to ignore when discussing infant mortality rates.