Tomorrow is the day. If the dire predictions for York come to pass, this comment from Albey will be the coda.
The US is the only wealthy country in the world where the life expectancy needle is moving the wrong way.
Between 1959 and 2014, the average length of time that Americans were expected to live was on the rise. Now, for the third year in a row, it’s declining, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Americans operate under a lot of misconceptions about how superior we are in many facets of our lives and this is not one of them,” the study’s lead author Steven Woolf told Business Insider. “We may think we have best medical care in world and highest life expectancy … but that’s not the case.”
“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”
So argues Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, the new magnum opus from UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong. It’s a bold claim. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; the “long twentieth century” represents 0.05 percent of that history.
But to DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Whereas before 1870, technological progress proceeded slowly, if at all, after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. And especially for residents of rich countries, this technological progress brought a world of unprecedented plenty.
DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66 percent increase — progress, to be sure. But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.
This looks like a very interesting book, as Delong’s interview with Dylan Matthews linked above makes clear.
Here I just want to note an extremely basic but not sufficiently appreciated point: throughout all of the many thousands of years of recorded human history, the most salient difference between social elites and everybody else almost everywhere was that the former weren’t living on the verge of starvation, while everyone else was. – Via LGM
“He didn’t even know KMG has legal issues.”
This isn’t surprising. Delaware has no TV stations for local news. The newspaper’s circulation is about 20% of what it was 20 years ago. Where would they learn of it?
To follow up on that, this is the reason York should have invested heavily on mailers. One side a pic of a smiling Lydia York, the other a hit piece of damning headlines and an unflattering photo of KMcG. That way you both educate voters about the incumbent and give them an alternative. And even if it’s seen for only 2 seconds on the way to the waste bin, it’s done its job.
This isn’t brain surgery, folks, and it ain’t all that expensive. Ms. York has no name recognition in the community, McGuiness has lots. York’s team did nothing to counter that.
Turning up at the Arden Fair is nice, but 90% of those she met already have no memory of it.
To paraphrase Menalaus “Pappy” O’Daniel, one-at-a-timin’ cannot compete with mass communicatin’.