Demagoguery implies an appeal to emotion rather than reason. The argument presented in this articles stems from reason and is an analysis of real, verifiable data, so I'd say no.
good on you to look more carefully.. I would say that the emotion here is the health outcome.. by saying "super bad health outcome" == "that group over there" it appeals to emotions, because just about any whole person would care about health outcomes for others, and any literate person would very likely care about health outcome for themselves.
with the emotion being the health outcome response, I would tend towards Yes, demagogue.
In the case of the clickbait-ish title I would agree, but if the actual claim is an accurate representation of the data[0] how is one supposed to phrase that idea in a way that _wouldn't_ be considered demagoguery under this broad of a definition?
[0] I don't currently have time to verify this myself.
not a specialist but I have worked alongside specialists in public policy and public health, at scale. I think the first step is that you need to classify the parts of the population a few ways.. income, language group, age, relationships in close contact / living quarters; next layer is something about education, vocation, and remove or focus on real health outliers.. special needs, dangerous jobs, any circumstantial effects in their area that affect many people.
Any real studies in health sciences rely on statistics, so the treatment of the stats has to be defensible. That specifically is where they lose me, but that is how it is done.
I do not subscribe to the partisan politics world-view, in many, many ways.. so I was motivated to disparage the idea that this study is adequate to learn by the reader. I also am not going to take the time to really read this one. hth
The article tries to come to the conclusion that correlation equals causation. The title reads "A growing gap in premature deaths along party lines underscores the collision of politics and public health" which implies politics causes premature deaths. In reality it's more likely that the average Republican voter skews both lower income and rural which is the true causation of deaths.
> In reality it's more likely that the average Republican voter skews both lower income and rural which is the true causation of deaths.
The author's based their analysis on data; is there data for your claim? There is plenty of poverty in cities.
EDIT: Quoting another commenter who quoted the OP: "[r]egardless of whether we looked at urban or rural areas, people living in areas with Republican political preferences were more likely to die prematurely than those in areas with Democratic political preferences"
I think that's a valid argument to be made. Stats have shown the Republican party has become more blue collar over time [1] and that white collar workers are trending left over time [2]. This would explain why the gap is growing: blue collar workers make less and sacrifice more of their health on the job than white collar workers. Blue collar workers also generally don't live in cities, because factories and industry aren't located in cities.
One party is hurting their own constituents by limiting access to healthcare at the state level. Verifying this actually has negative outcomes isn’t inherently political. Imagine if the research showed zero correlation, that would have been far more interesting.
Understanding the outcomes of political choices isn’t inherently political. It’s completely reasonable for someone to say yes this saves lives but it’s still not worth the money.
A different track, but the political decision on many on the right(media and personalities) to minimize the dangers of the virus, and demonize the vaccines caused bad outcomes.
It’s not about the victory or loss of either party. It’s saying there are two Americas developing simultaneously and people in each have different health outcomes.
Are the parties causative? Or are they just the labels that we have to describe the two groups currently? We don’t know.
Or is it the other way around? Commenters occasionally often point out the "red states" are the biggest recipients of welfare in spite of being the ones that vote most against it. To me, it seems that the most likely explanation for this is that the voters there see the negative effects of welfare and the ones who are voting for it are insulated most from the unintended consequences. It could just as easily be that the voters who see the most death are voting for the party they most feel will enact policies that will lead to less of it.
Before looking for cause, you always look for plausible co-variates. Here, there are a ton: red counties tend to be rural. Rural places have huge problems with health care access, obesity, addiction, poverty, and many other issues that predict poor health outcome.
That doesn't "take it into account"...it just plots them, based on which presidential candidate the county voted for. And by looking at the plot, it's clear that age-adjusted mortality rates are almost perfectly aligned for rural democratic and republican areas until 2009, when they drop suddenly for the democratic areas. Then they both continue tracking in parallel. Why is that? Can't tell. Sure is suspicious. Could it be that a bunch of counties flipped in 2008?
I skimmed this paper to see if the authors did any of the facepalm-obvious things you'd do to control for covariates if you were serious about doing an observational analysis (e.g. multi-factor regression), but saw nothing. They're literally just looking at differences in slopes in the lines:
> Trends in mortality were examined to identify
changes in slope using Joinpoint Regression Program
version 4.8.0.1, which models consecutive linear
segments on a log scale, connected by joinpoints, and
can measure when slopes of annual percentage change
(APC) undergo a statistically significant change
This is a...well, let's just call it non-conventional...analysis method.
> Rural places have huge problems with health care access, obesity, addiction, poverty, and many other issues that predict poor health outcome.
So, yes, probably, but. I went in a rural area in West Virginia for some personal reasons. And i mean rural. One hours and a half from Charleston, and half an hour of the nearest town (population: 728). I think i met all the democrat voters there(four dozen or so :P). Mountain guides, kayak/raft guides, musicians(a lot), old hippies living off the land, a lily farmer, a lot of organic farmers too (And the first goat farmer who convinced me than US cheese is at least as good as french/italian goat cheese). Some of them without running water, almost half of them off grid. I think the "fatest" one was barely over my weight, so between 27 and 29 BMI. I also went to the organic farmer market in Hungtington (Clearly not republican leaning, as the sticker against mountain top mining, pro-unions and "Freedom Industries = Lexycon, protect our water" could show) and to a city music festival (were i met all those communist hippies again). Frankly, the overall health and shape of those people, i thought i was back in europe.
Poverty and health care access, yes. Addiction: not that much. Some are alcoholics, i think i met one meth user, but no one tried to sell to us, and their social life is way too full to have time for this shit. Obesity: clearly not. Less than in Paris.
Also, these people were clearly aware of the Elk river incident (it was four years after, still had banners and stickers warning about water quality) and did flush/replace their pipes, and could very well be the only ones who did.
That would only explain a point in time state of affairs but not why they observed the effect widen along party lines. Their theory was that blue areas expanded medicare and red areas didn't but there could be others.
>Commenters occasionally often point out the "red states" are the biggest recipients of welfare in spite of being the ones that vote most against it.
Usually framed as "blue states are paying for the red states' welfare". But this isn't true.
First, the state of California does not pay a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of California that pay federal taxes, which in turn provide funding and services to states and individuals.
Second, the Rockefeller Institute (<https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...>) shows that, as of 2018 (the last time I checked this data; I see that 2019 is now available), the 10 states at the bottom of the per capita list—that is, the states that benefit from the most federal spending per person compared to how much each person pays in federal taxes—are
2016/2020 Hillary/Biden-voting states: VA, NM, MD, HI, 1/2 of ME
2016/2020 Trump-voting states: KY, AK, AL, WV, MS, 1/2 of ME
It's not so much "blue states" as per the above-mentioned claim, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government. After them come CO, NE, UT, and MN, of which half voted for Hillary/Biden and half for Trump. All other states, including CA, are net beneficiaries of the taxpayers in the top eight (and, again, really, it's the top four).
The end of the piece makes it pretty explicit what the point is actually: authors believe democratic policies are better and should be pushed to republican regions.
They then go on to talk out of both sides of their mouth on this front, that "health care shouldn't be enmeshed with politics" but hoping that politicians will
"listen" to them.
What people mean when they say that is that someone's opinion on evidence-based policies shouldn't be intertwined with their allegiance to a particular party. The entire point of politics is determining policy, and policy has an effect on the outcomes the doctors that wrote the article want to improve.
In any case authors are clearly making a political argument and implying if not explicitly making a causation argument here, not merely describing the state of the world.
The state of the world is the result of politics. You can't talk about one without talking about the other. Like the Texas energy grid being a disaster is the result of conservative deregulation and privatization. Merely describing the state means you're simply describing the effect and not the cause.
> Isn't this basic demagoguery 101 -- attach huge social outcomes to the victory or loss of one political party?
Isn't the entire point of politics and political parties to change social outcomes? "Your policy X will negatively impact social outcomes because reason Y while my policy Z will positively impact them" is a huge chunk of politics.
Besides, I don't see how actually trying to measure outcomes of specific policies is "demagoguery"? The author(s) of this paper may be wrong (I didn't look too deeply at the study), but that's not the same as "demagoguery".
I've become disturbed by this tendency the last couple of years to justify political decisions by appeal to public health. My own political leanings are complex, so I say this not from a partisan perspective.
It's very easy to specify hypothetical laws, that if enacted and enforced, would have dramatic public health benefits. A tyrrany of health, if you will. But that doesn't mean it would be ethically acceptable. Conversely, a great many military and other actions, ethically justified, are not healthy at all for its participants.
The problem with these political appeals based on public health is that physical health per se, or even health in general, is just one of many values to be weighted in decision making. I think there's been a general creep in what "health" encompasses, while being selective in other ways. I do think this is part of the reason for pushback from certain quarters, a reaction against trying to dress up politics in the disguise of science without being honest about it.
Science is always political to some extent, I think. So trying to argue that some phenomenon is a "scientific" issue, and therefore best addressed by qualified scientists seems disingenuous to me. It's not so much that expertise isn't real, it's that it has to have limits or it's meaningless.
A) The paper is primarily a study of numerical trends.
B) Some potential policy causes for this difference are listed in the discussion section. While this is not the primary focus of this paper, the discussion links to several other prior studies regarding particular policies and their impacts.
C) However, more specific details (other than the above postulates) is not part of the paper's focus. This is acknowledged as a limitation in the study, and it is also acknowledged that other factors aside from policy (such as poor health or social and economic factors that may also motivate political preference) explain some of the hap. So it is important not to read too much detail into the cause of this gap at this time.
Yes, it is. It compares age-adjusted mortality rates without taking other factors into account. What this study shows is that upper middle-class urban and suburban voters - who are more likely to vote D - have a lower mortality rate than lower and lower middle-class rural voters - who are more likely to vote R. While the article states that [r]egardless of whether we looked at urban or rural areas, people living in areas with Republican political preferences were more likely to die prematurely than those in areas with Democratic political preferences it fails to notice that 'areas with democratic political preferences' in rural states tend to be more urban and as such have more upper middle-class D voters which resemble their ideological compatriots in coastal urban areas more than they have in common with the small town and rural R voters elsewhere in their rural states.
This may be just a classical correlation =/= causation error or it is campaign fodder for the upcoming elections.
