It's just an empty statement. A dead millionaire has a lower life expectancy than a living welfare recipient. True, but irrelevant - the fact that you choose to add details to even things out means that you had some cause in your perception of their relative baselines to decide on the direction of your adjustments.
> Poor people can be healthier than rich people. If wealth was a dominant cause of better health then that outcome would be unlikely.
You're mixing possibility and probability, and the entire point is that it is unlikely.
edit: I feel like I have to be very explicit here, because this is very basic: A particular result of a comparison being unlikely to be true for any pair of individuals does not mean that if you find a single example of a comparison going the other way, you've proved something. People are very unlikely to be on an airplane at any particular time. That doesn't mean that no one is on an airplane, or that anyone anywhere being on an airplane is an uncommon event.
> "It's just an empty statement. A dead millionaire has a lower life expectancy than a living welfare recipient. True, but irrelevant - the fact that you choose to add details to even things out means that you had some cause in your perception of their relative baselines to decide on the direction of your adjustments."
I'm making that extra distinction to make it clear that it's about the lifestyle, not the money per se. The perception is that wealthier people in the US have a healthier lifestyle on average than poor people in the US. However, by looking at the issue globally you can see that people who live in cultures that are healthier than the US do not necessarily have more money than the US, nor is there such a pronounced difference between the health of the richest and the health of the poorest in those healthier cultures. With that in mind, you can see that it's not the money making the difference, but rather the cultural norms. If you want to get more specific, compare the diets of the various countries with the best life expectancy, and look at the affordability to the locals for such a diet.
> "You're mixing possibility and probability, and the entire point is that it is unlikely.
edit: I feel like I have to be very explicit here, because this is very basic: A particular result of a comparison being unlikely to be true for any pair of individuals does not mean that if you find a single example of a comparison going the other way, you've proved something. People are very unlikely to be on an airplane at any particular time. That doesn't mean that no one is on an airplane, or that anyone anywhere being on an airplane is an uncommon event."
Look at what the countries with the longest life expectancy do to achieve that. Now ask yourself how much it would cost other countries to achieve similar results.
> Poor people can be healthier than rich people. If wealth was a dominant cause of better health then that outcome would be unlikely.
You're mixing possibility and probability, and the entire point is that it is unlikely.
edit: I feel like I have to be very explicit here, because this is very basic: A particular result of a comparison being unlikely to be true for any pair of individuals does not mean that if you find a single example of a comparison going the other way, you've proved something. People are very unlikely to be on an airplane at any particular time. That doesn't mean that no one is on an airplane, or that anyone anywhere being on an airplane is an uncommon event.