Excerpts:
The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.
Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education “keeps coming up.”
The study is partly based on empirical studies of Adriana Lleras-Muney. It is not clear how it works (correlation vs causation) but some suspect that education may somehow teach people to delay gratification. Lleras-Muney's papers can be found here and one of the papers relevant to the above article may be mortalityrevision1.pdf. There are other papers on this issue by Angus Deaton, some of them available at the electronic journaledited by Padma Prakash. This site has also an article by Kaushik Basu on teacher truancy in India
Kuffir in his blog and comments in various Indian blogs has been frequently emphasizing the merits of education for all.
3 comments:
Thanks, Swarup, for linking to this article. Several people have expressed their dismay at the simple-minded way in which the reporter has confused correlation with causation. For example, take a look the accompanying graphic which is meant to show that increasing levels of education are accompanied by increasing longevity. The track behind each data point shows a country's trajectory over a 15 year period starting in 1985.
For India, the number of years in school went up from three to five years, and life expectancy went up by about seven or eight years. Clearly, over a short span of 15 years, these two trends track two mutually exclusive age groups, no?
Wouldn't a simpler explanation go like this: The increase in the number of years in school is because we educated the young better, and the increased life expectancy is because we took care of our older citizens better (for example, through better healthcare).
Abi,
Lleras's studies seem to take one of your points in to account:
"The answer came one day when Dr. Lleras-Muney was reading another economics paper. It indicated that about 100 years ago, different states started passing laws forcing children to go to school for longer periods. She knew what to do."
Still, I think one has to be careful about even empirical studies.
swarup:
thanks for the link and the comments. i'd like to reassure abi that while nytimes reporters sometimes tend to dumb things down in their articles, leading to the seeming confusion between correlation and causation in this case, adriana lleras-muney's work addresses this issue very rigorously.
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