The length of an elven lifespan

One thing that gets me in fantasy literature: Elves, and how long elves live. Usually, we see elves living incredibly long lifespans "off-screen." Since they don't age, we see elves living thousands and thousands of years. Naturally, in the course of events that happen on-stage, they die off in fairly large numbers due to unnatural causes.

Elves aren't invincible. Some kinds of elves, such as Tolkien's elves, are immune to disease. These elves only die due to violence, lethal accidents, or suicide. Our first order estimate is therefore based on the most recent statistics for that - the WHO 2002 report on mortality. We see that 83 out of every 100,000 people die traumatically violent untimely deaths, and an additional 8 out of 100,000 starve to death.

With humans, this varies with age, but since elves are unaging and unchanging beings, we'll assume the average rate holds for all elves of any age. Thus, each year, 0.091% of all elves die. This means that the elven time of death is drawn from a simple exponential distribution with parameter λ = 0.00091.

The mean of an exponential distribution is simply 1/λ, so the average elven lifespan is 1100 years. The median elven lifespan is shorter - 760 years - and about 40% of elves live past their first millenium.

But 2002 was not that violent of a year. War, genocide, and famines tend to happen in short sharp "spikes." Only 2.8 people per 100,000 died as a result of war in 2002; over the course of the 20th century, about 10 billion people drew breath. 6 billion of those lived to see the end of it, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million died in excessive spikes of "mass death" - famines and wars. That's 2,000 per 100,000 per 100 years; taking the appropriate 1/100th root, we get an average of 40 per 100,000.

If we take out today's war deaths and famine deaths and substitute an averaged value of 40 for "mass death" events, we get about 120 per 100,000. At λ = 0.0012, the average elven lifespan is 830 years, and the typical elf lives a mere 580 years. Only 30% of elves live to see out the end of their first millenium. One out of every 160,000 would live to see their tenth millenium.

Not all fantasy mythos leave elves immune to disease - and infectious disease represented 175 per 100,000 deaths in 2002. Historically, diseases have killed far more than violence and starvation, even among the healthy "young adult" population (smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, malaria, outbreaks of various plagues - these can kill at any age) - so if elves aren't immune to disease, we would probably want to see λ to become substantially larger and the elven lifespan much shorter.

In the limiting case, where we consider lethal accidents, violence, and disease terms more typical to the dark ages? Well, let's just say that two or three centuries doesn't seem like such a short time for an elf to live, after all.

Context and quality

The other night, I was talking with a lovely poli sci student and wound up bringing up Jumper, which would appear to be three related things:

1. A 1992 book I greatly enjoyed reading several times 10-15 years ago and classed as an exemplar of the writing craft (though not necessarily the writing art).
2. A 2008 movie widely reputed to be bad.
3. A 2007 book written to tie into the screenplay.
   

I have yet to experience items number 2 and 3, but I wonder: Would, today, I still enjoy item number 1? Would I enjoy it if I encountered it for the first time now? The terrorist-obsessed vigilante might seem much more heavily worn after living through 8 years of terrorism-obsessed politics; the damaged young man struggling to connect with a normal life and normal relationships might not be nearly as sympathetic a character.

And perhaps my standards for the writing craft have changed. I was impressed not with the plots or characterizations of Jumper, but by what I saw as a remarkably smooth flow of words, a mechanically well-put-together piece of fiction. I read 1-2 other books by the same author not long after, and was unimpressed with them. But today, would I apply the same standard? Do I care more or less about the craftsmanship that went into a book - and do I consider the same things good?

I suppose I should re-read it and see what I think of the book now, but re-reading a book is never the same as encountering it for the very first time.

The socialized medicine we already have

The public dialog surrounding health care has become fairly frustrating to me. There's a generation gap, an information gap, a comprehension gap, and not only that, but plenty of hypocrisy and misinformation going around.

First: No, the US health care system is not the best in the world. We may have the best experts on some diseases, and very good health care, but the overall quality of care, system-wide, is no better than tenth in the world. Even Forbes magazine - hardly a bastion of socialism - puts the US at 11th healthiest. In 2000, the WHO put the US health care system as 15th best - 37th accounting for how much we spend.

No matter what anecdotes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages, or anybody else spout about the horrors of socialized medicine, the fact of the matter is that nearly every serious look at the data tell us that Canada, the UK, Sweden, etc have far better health care systems.

Second: The US already has government-provided health care. For 2005, the WHO calculates total government spending on health care in the US at $2,862 per capita (out of a total of $6,350 - yes, both figures have risen substantially in the last 4 years). In other words, between Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran's Administration, and other government provided insurance and health care systems, Uncle Sam pays directly for about 45% of all health care.

I don't believe that counts the employer tax break, which as an indirect subsidy amounts to about $500 per person, and Medicare spending has grown sharply in the last four years. Government insurance programs cover directly more than a quarter of the population directly, and the subsidies affect half the population.

The result of selectively covering the poor, elderly, and disabled is one of the most expensive (and least efficient) government health care systems in the developed world. The US government, in 2005, spent more money per capita on health care than the Canadian government, the German government, the UK government, the Swedish government, and most of the other European governments you hear about when people start talking about socialized medicine and universal health care.

Iceland, Switzerland, and Denmark's governments all spent more than Uncle Sam in 2005 - in nominal terms, but in terms of purchasing power parity (everything is more expensive there), they spent less than our government. Austria pretty much matches us in PPP terms; so far as I can tell, the French and Norwegian governments alone spent more money on health care than our government did.

In fact, US government spending on health care is about the same as total health care expenditures - public and private - in the countries I usually use as examples, Japan and Sweden. (Anyone think that Japan has a recent history as a bastion of socialism?)

So if "government provided health care" is a form of socialism ... ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the United States: The world's third or fourth most socialized medicine on the planet - and the only one in the top 20 that can't manage to cover all its citizens.

Third: The generation gap. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that employer health benefits are on the downslide. And that matters a lot more for us young folk, who are part-timers, new hires whose contracts don't have grandfathered care, entrepreneurs, subcontractors, self-employed, and generally get the short end of the stick when it comes to government subsidies and government-provided coverage.

I'm 25. Mortality and disease and high health care bills are pretty uncommon in our age bracket - but there aren't many of us who don't realize that skimping on preventative care now will cost use when we're older, or that one accident, one unusual disease will completely wipe out our pocketbooks and put us in the hole. Not only that, but we probably won't even be able to get care until later in the course of a disease or long-term condition if we aren't covered, and that means it'll get a lot worse.

And so most of us are strongly in favor of health care reform. It's not surprising; we're right there. We can see our self-interest, and we can see our taxes fueling a system that spends enormously and inefficiently on everybody else. And when I hear about all the older folks hollering and protesting at "town hall" meetings about "socialized medicine," I can't help but think: There is someone who probably benefitted from government-subsidized health care for several decades of their life, and is probably covered directly by Medicare now.

And I think to myself that they are probably more than a little bit of a hypocrite. They have socialized medicine. They're probably afraid it'll get cut if the government stretches out to pay for everybody - something I think about a lot when I look at how older folk respond to intimations of Medicare cuts. Those young people, they don't need insurance, most of them are really healthy - so many of the older generation seems to think.

And who is going to be paying for this, paying for the growing national debt, paying for any health care reform? Most of today's retirees aren't going to be paying many taxes twenty or thirty years down the road. Most of today's young people will. So when I see members of the older generation fighting health care reform tooth and nail, I look at the demographics and the statistics and I think to myself that it looks like most of the protesters are engaging in an exercise in hypocrisy.

But back to the issure of young people needing coverage. Here we come to the comprehension gap. Because when it comes to having health care, it's do or die. And so when it comes to insurance, you need coverage that will handle a major emergency, which in a market where the government is paying for most of everybody else's ticket, in a market where you can't shop around between more than a handful of providers, in a market where bloated middlemen work hard to make their share larger, in a market with an enormous information gap, means that you're completely fucked if you're a little fish on your own shopping for coverage.

I happen to have gotten lucky in that my graduate school actually provides health coverage as part of my funding package, and it might even be adequate coverage in the event of a major medical emergency. I don't know yet. There's always a lot of fine print, and I haven't spent several weeks reviewing it - not that I could afford to buy adequate coverage on my graduate stipend. I don't exactly have a choice there.





So. That turned out to be a longer rant than I expected, and there's so much more I could talk about, but I'll leave you with the summary and the recap. First, other countries do actually have better health care systems. Second, the US government is already spending enough to provide universal coverage and better coverage. Third, your experience and understanding of this country's health care is going to vary radically based on age and socioeconomic background.

At the risk of sounding like a teenager, many of you making loud objections really just don't understand. The holes in the system are a lot more visible to those of us living in them, and to those who trip over and fall in one.

A secession scenario, part III

The past two installments of this series have been discussing a hypothetical Republican-led anti-Obama secession movement and what things would look like if about one third of the states seceded. Today, I'd like to spend just one moment turning the map inside-out.

When I constructed the ASA, I started off by taking every state that has a Republican legislature, a Republican governor, and voted against Obama. I.e., we didn't include Florida, because Florida voted for Obama. I then added the two states Obama did worst in (Wyoming and Oklahoma) despite their Democratic governors, and threw in Montana because they have been surrounded. Now let's do the opposite, for fairness' sake - what's the Democrat-ruled Obama Nation look like?

OK, so let's take the states that voted for Obama and have wholly Democratic state governments - so not including Arkansas and West Virginia, Democrat-run states which voted against Obama. Now add Hawaii and Vermont because Obama did best in those two states (in spite of their Republican governors). Connecticut and Rhode Island we now add for geographic reasons.

Unlike the ASA, we can't connect all the Democratic states of America using only four states - but there is one state that Obama polled over 60% in that we haven't included, and it's a big enough state to make an entire "disputed region" all by itself: California. So here's our map, for completeness.

The highlighted states (blue) have a population of 98 million and a GDP of $4.9 trillion ($50,200 per capita). You can see how much less geographically contiguous this group is - scattered across the country in five different pieces. And I think that highlights the point perfectly.

Now, if the ASA's GDP per capita was barely below the US average, and these Democratic states average well above the US average, that tells us something really odd that I don't think I've heard before. The most bipartisan states in the union, as a group, number in their group most of the poorest states. Maybe it's a historical anomaly that the states whose local governments and presidential preferences are split are poorer than those who are entirely red or blue in 2008; maybe it actually means something.

Cuba: A look into the perils of communist health care

Whenever I hear people discussing the perils of socialized medicine, I think of three countries immediately. Japan, Sweden, and Cuba. Japan and Sweden I immediately think of because these are two of the indisputably healthiest countries.

Sweden has universal almost-free health coverage, where the state pays for about 98% of all costs; in Japan, health coverage is mandatory and either supplied through an employer, with the government providing coverage for students, elderly, farmers, and the self-employed. We could consider Japan the exemplar for the private model and Sweden the exemplar for the public model; in either case, the far less healthy United States is getting far less bang for its health care bucks than either.

However, I think of Cuba because Cuba is actually identified as communist. Nobody is going to dispute that Cuba is communist - nor will anybody mistake Cuba for a rich country. The CIA World Factbook estimates that Cuba's GDP per capita, by purchasing power parity, is only $9500, barely more in total than what we spend per capita on health care.

Cuba spends even less - the WHO estimates 7.6% of its GDP - and due to Cuba's particular economic and trade relations situations, Cuba is short on many modern medical supplies, and this is reflected in the number of Cubans dying from causes we consider easily preventable.

Here's where the Cuban system falls short. Maternal mortality - perhaps noncoincidentally, this ratio is matched by the rise in the number of c-sections performed. Tuberculosis - detection, treatment, and prevention. Child deaths due to diarhorreal disease or pneumonia - which would be especially easily solved with a little more money for drugs and sanitation infrastructure.

Cuba also has noticably - albeit not as dramatically - higher deaths due to cardiovascular problems, something that may be linked to Cuba's substantially higher tobacco use rather than a specific deficiency in care, but that pretty much covers all of it.

Life expectancy in Cuba is quite similar to the US. Infant, child, and adult mortality are overall lower. And what does it say about us that we spend twenty times as much on health care (ref) and yet get so little, as a population, out of our health care system? How much would it cost us to match Cuba's infant and child mortality rates?

I am sure there are many specific procedures that are simply not available in a poor country like Cuba - but how can a rich country like the United States fail so badly with basic care that all the advanced procedures in the world barely let us catch up to our poorer neighbor on the demographic level?

The oddity of the informed middleman

On a certain level, salespeople tend to bother me a little. Not so much personally - although one of the people at my undergraduate alma mater I found the most reasons to personally dislike ended up working as a car salesman for a little while - as in terms of the general concept of the role. The line between salesperson and scam artist can be very slim, and it's difficult to see, sometimes, just what they add.

There are two elements that combine to make salespeople hazardous. One is working on commission; the other is informational imbalance. If you work in sales, you probably are paid on commission, even if you work as a middleman between two parties (as, say, real estate agents do) rather than working directly for some manufacturer.

I can think of several scams that involve trying to hook lots of amateur sales-interested folk by requiring them to buy expensive samples or the merchandise they will sell, and then doling out a narrow commission. I say "scam" because some of these operations make their real money selling sample kits to would-be salespersons rather than moving merchandise through those salespersons. The commission is a powerful motivating tool.

Now, when combined with the information gap, a salesperson on the ground has every reason to outright lie to uninformed customers if it will get them to purchase something marginally more expensive, to incrementally stretch bit by bit their intended budget, and since little of it is written down, there's often little recourse for a consumer who has been deceived with a personal sales pitch.

I've been lied to by sales folk more than once myself. And by and large, the consumer is in something of a bind: They need an expert on computers, cell phones, etc that they can talk to, who will explain all the features they don't quite understand - but while the salesperson is such an expert, and a remarkably easy to find one, there's every reason not to trust them.

Oddly, my experience is that when there's no commission in play and a generous returns policy, employees working for a wage are perfectly willing to dish out honestly about which products do what and what you probably need for what you want to do. Remember all the jokes about used car dealers? The grain of truth in them is why I so tend to distrust salespeople. It's nothing personal, salesfolk; it's simply that I'm pretty sure your interests and my interests are as close to orthogonal as they could be given that we're talking about the same kind of product.

A secession scenario, part II

Continuing from where we left off last time, we divided the USA up based on a hypothetical Republican-led, anti-Obama secession movement, and then looked at the composition of the ASA (the "anti-socialist" seceded states) and RSA (remaining states). Today, in the second part of the series, I'd like for us to explore what the major obstacles to a secession movement would be in a number of these states and regions.

The Old South

There are a few common problems in this region that present an obstacle to secession attempts, one being that a Republican-led secession movement would probably struggle in Democratic state legislatures in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A powerful reason across the entire region is that 29% of the population of this region is black. Percentages range from 37% in Mississippi to 26% in Alabama, and while you can find a number of Southern whites who will say that states' rights and secession are things that have nothing to do with race, you would be hard-pressed to find Southern blacks willing to agree. And that's with secession in general; an anti-Obama secession movement would inflame racial tensions to heights not seen since the 1970s even if it failed. In the event any of these states were to secede from the rest of the US, I would expect to see things get very ugly in a hurry for the reasons of race and history.

Georgia

Georgia is the largest and most prosperous state in this region. However, while Georgia's state government is firmly in Republican hands, Georgia is also the state in this region that gave Obama the highest percentage of the vote - a full 47%, his third-smallest percentage loss in the country behind Montana and Missouri. This would present a major obstacle to any secession movement in Georgia; Obama simply doesn't have the net negatives in Georgia that he does in the rest of the South. Georgia has also spent the most effort reinventing itself as part of a new South; Atlanta, as the center of the "New South," would represent a powerful center of opposition to secession.

South Carolina

South Carolina is one of the two states in this region whose state governments are controlled by Republicans. South Carolina also is the state with the longest history of secession threats, and did so in December 1860, before any other state in the Confederacy. It was also the site of what is widely regarded as the first battle of the Civil War (Fort Sumter) and for these powerful historical reasons, a secession movement starting in South Carolina cannot avoid being compared to the Civil War. Also, two practical points to consider: If Georgia does not secede, South Carolina would be surrounded; and South Carolina's economy relies heavily on the tourism industry, something that is likely to take a sharp nosedive even in a peaceful secession.

Mormon Triad

Three of the most heavily Republican states, with three of the four lowest Obama vote percentages, are also the three with the highest percentages of Mormons in their population, which helps me come up with a handy name that doesn't sound like it should include Colorado and Montana. Utah is much more Mormon than Idaho, which is much more Mormon than Wyoming; the three of them combined are close to half Mormon, with around 2.3 million LDC members out of a combined population of 4.8 million. However, the name is much more than that; it's a reminder of how influential the CLDS is within the Republican party, especially in Idaho and Utah. If there are any three states in which the opinion of Church elders will matter, it will be these three states.

An interesting historical fact: During the civil war, an assembly of the Mormon church sent a petition to Congress to join the United States. I know very little about the inner workings of the current CLDS, but I expect secession to be controversial enough that it will matter what is being said within the CLDS, and I do not expect these three states to secede on their own account - if and only if Republicans across the nation are clamoring for secession. However, in these states, and in the Plains states (the column running down from North Dakota to Oklahoma), we don't expect white-black racial tensions and the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Act to be as important.

Montana

Montana, I should note, is something of a special case that I tossed in on the secession side without a very detailed explanation. Montana is increasingly Democratic, and McCain edged out Obama in Montana by barely more than 2% of the vote. I included Montana for two reasons, and two reasons only. The first is that increasingly Democratic or not, Montana has a powerful libertarian tradition and a lot of very independent-minded folk, and the justification of this scenario was that the country would split over health care. The second is that if the Mormon Triad and the Northern Plains states (Nebraska and the Dakotas) all secede, then Montana will be completely surrounded by seceded states, at which point secession would start to sound a lot more reasonable.

We can expect, however, that Montana would be likely to secede only in the event those six other states all seceding - and it is not guaranteed even then.

Texas

Texas is an interesting state, even more so within this collection, because we actually have seen polls run gauging the popularity of secession in Texas. We've seen polls run for two reasons: One, the governor was talking about. Two, Texas probably is the most likely state to secede. It's a large state with a significant population, a large economy, lots of natural resources, and an unusually strong identity. Texans identify as Texan. The forum post inspiring this exploration assumed Texas would lead any secession movement - and even so, polls have suggested that secession struggles to reach majority support among Texas Republicans, and is unpopular within the general population.

So when we talk about Texas... we cannot help but see how unlikely any secession scenario is in the near future. It makes for some fun stories to talk about, and perhaps by closely watching the continuing saga of Governor Perry, we might see what it would take to have another period of secession from the Union.