Comments on: List Of The Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of “The Two-Income Trap” http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/ In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging Fri, 24 Jul 2015 06:54:29 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3 By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-141116 Sun, 31 Aug 2014 08:03:05 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-141116 Also, houses have gone up in size by like 40%. I don’t know why they’re being measured in number of rooms (which you would expect them to decrease with decreasing family sizes anyway) when people measure houses by square footage.

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]]> By: Douglas Knight http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-118538 Wed, 09 Jul 2014 05:20:26 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-118538 Anonymous, I hereby diagnose you with a trillion cancers, one per cell. In the unlikely event that you don’t die this year, the cancer survival rate will be 99.9999999999%.

Or you could just click on the link.

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-118527 Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:57:36 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-118527 Since not dying from cancer is all about early diagnosis, I don’t see how the number to which the earliness of diagnoses contributes could possibly be worthless.

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]]> By: Douglas Knight http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-118007 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 13:48:45 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-118007 Anonymous, it is not at all about US vs UK. The statistic in your link, survival rate, has risen quickly in both places. The whole point of Michael’s link is that survival rates are a worthless statistic. They are higher purely because of earlier diagnosis and false diagnosis.

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117741 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 03:45:41 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117741 @Michael I admit I was lazy and clicked on the first link on wikipedia not checking that it had data for the UK not the US: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15726810

Kind of surprising that it should be different though, so maybe your article just slices the data differently?

In any case I don’t think anyone will argue with the larger point that healthcare in 2014 is much better than it was in 1970, even if it indeed turns out not true for cancer specifically (which surprises me).

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]]> By: Anonymous http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117715 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 03:09:20 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117715 @Phil

I understand that these things are nominally more expensive now. However, the fact stands that people consume more of them. We could go into theorizing why, but if you have more of everything than you are better off, no matter what the price tags on each item says.

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]]> By: Phil Goetz http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117670 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 01:42:05 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117670 Er, parts of my comment didn’t make any sense.

– The surprisingly small increase in EPR and inflation are both possible explanations for the “missing women”.

– My thoughts re. the 200-year-old CPI basket were along the lines of finding things produced all that time, and recomputing GDP using them, counting units produced rather than their dollar cost. An attempt to measure technological productivity enhancement. Of course you would still need to measure the cost of production, or at least the number of labor hours required for production.

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]]> By: Phil Goetz http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117661 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 01:32:44 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117661 Douglas, my comment was specifically addressing what Michael’s link says about cancer. The fact that cancer deaths stayed constant, rather than rising, suggests cancer treatment improved. Cancer is the disease that people die of when they don’t die of something else first.

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]]> By: Douglas Knight http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117613 Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:07:38 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117613 Phil, Michael’s link explicitly addresses your comment about cancer. Anyhow, the point is that Anonymou’s example of cancer is a terrible example of medical progress.

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]]> By: Phil Goetz http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/06/list-of-the-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-the-two-income-trap/#comment-117586 Mon, 07 Jul 2014 23:34:39 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=2360#comment-117586 Ah. Yes re. “productivity”. I was thinking something like “gross domestic product”.

The data in that comment is interesting. Note that it sounds from those figures like EPR in 1950 was about 53%, so a 10 point increase is still significant.

As to that discussion, though, I think the “missing women” may be well explained by inflation. GDP is inflation-adjusted. If each family makes more money, and spends more money, and prices rise as a result, capitalists will capture those labor gains, and they won’t show up in the GDP.

It would be interesting to recompute GDP over the past 200 years using a constant CPI basket of good produced throughout that time, like bread, coffee, lumber, nails, and miles of travel.

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