Re: Re: Re: More privatisation

[Bill Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

As it happens I am doing something very similar, as part of an effort to
figure out why personal income _inequality_ is strongly (negatively)
related to (age-adjusted) mortality rates in US cities, but not in Canadian
cities. In other words, do more -- and more equal -- public goods in
Canadian cities (schools, transit, libraries, sewers, etc.) mitigate some
of the negative effects of personal income inequality that prevail in the
US?  (Of course, personal income itself is also strongly negatively related
to mortality, but an additional? inequality effect seems to apply over the
range of income.)

BTW, some good recent work on the relation of income inequality and
mortality is by Australian epidemiologist John Lynch. He offers a
"neo-material" explanation for this relation in place of some of the
'social capital' ideas (trust, cohesion, civic participation, etc.)
recently discussed on Pen-L.

If anyone is working on similar points, please contact me to compare notes.

Bill Burgess

> On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 12:15:07AM +1100, Rob Schaap wrote:
> > G'day all,
> >
> > I see the best-cities-to-live-in poll for the year is out.  If memory
> serves,
> > Vancouver came top and the likes of Vienna, Geneva and Sydney were
> runners up
> > (my favourites, Melbourne and Amsterdam did well, too - and if these
> gits had
> > bothered to visit Hobart' Oz would have had the winner, too).  Anyway, the
> > reason I bring this up is because the salient virtue of these places
> (against
> > traditional faves like London and Paris) are apparently the quality of
> *public
> > services* and the capacity of leading candidates to resist the inhuman
> pace of
> > life of our age.  I'm not suggesting such poncy convocations constitute an
> > unimpeachable source (although the bottom-of-the-listers, Brazzaville and
> > Baghdad, are not destinations of mine right now, either), but I do suggest
> > there's a job for an idle economist out there in the collection of the
> sort of
> > data economists don't count (you could add suicide rates, all those focus
> > group reports on quality-of-life priorities, Australian state election exit
> > polls, intra-city and inter-state migration trends,
> letters-to-the-editor, and
> > a whole lot of the sort of stuff you often find buried in little columns on
> > page 6 of the Sunday papers).  My suspicion is that, taken together, such a
> > project would produce a monumental wall of evidence against
> privatisation in
> > particular and the existence of homo economicus in general.
> >
> > Does anyone do this sort of thing?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Rob.
> >
>
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx