Mastodawn

Colin Angus Jul 4, 2023

@flodebarre I think it very much depends on context. If you are citing something like ‘there was much public debate about x’ then that seems unproblematic to me to cite a newspaper. If you are using a newspaper to back up a factual statement then I think that’s much less defensible.

Colin Angus Mar 31, 2023

@izzy It certainly plays *some* role, but relative to the US and Scotland, opioid deaths (and other 'deaths of despair') are relatively low - we wrote a pre-print comparing the UK, US and Canada last year: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.22280916v1.full-text

This mostly focused on mid-life, but the younger age data doesn't show a very different pattern - e.g. this graph of male death rates by age:

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Colin Angus Mar 31, 2023

@tomstafford I think it might narrow the gap in higher incomes, and widen it (probably a lot) at lower incomes.

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Colin Angus Mar 31, 2023

@tomstafford I imagine an economist would say you can make these comparisons, although you'd have a big issue with stated vs. revealed preferences I imagine.
I might value Y years of somebody else's life at X, but I might be willing to give up a lot more X if the Ys were mine...

And we should probably weight all the Ys by health, just for added fun.

Colin Angus Mar 31, 2023

Following John Burn-Murdoch's excellent/horrifying thread on the other channel about premature mortality in the US, I wondered how much worse the picture was for young men specifically and how Scotland compared.

It turns out the answers are *much worse* and *not as bad, but not good either*.

Also, what's happening in Canada?

#RStats code for this plot is here: https://github.com/VictimOfMaths/Routine-Data/blob/master/HMDPlots.R