Week 4

Week 4

by Richard Hu -

Along the lines of readings from last week, it seems that there's an underlying assumption in the Ouellette reading (at least initially or in the earlier studies) that the U.S. is the "leader" in declining mortality and its technological/medicinal advances are what started the trend of declining mortality worldwide ("It shows clearly that the sudden onset of mortality decline in the late 1960s was not restricted to the United States"), however, results from this study seem to clearly contradict that. Notable examples include Japan, Canada, U.K., Switzerland, and France, which, based on Figure 2, all appear to see decline before the U.S. does (although the trends in the figure and the data in Table 1 are at odds in my mind). I wonder if this stereotype is simply because the U.S. was labeled as the first "superpower" for developing the first atomic weapons?

It's also interesting to look at the difference in the graphs of Figure 2 between males and females, as well as the trends in Figures 3 and 4. We already knew that women tend to live longer and therefore should have lower mortality rates, but the change in rates for men is striking to look at. Figure 3 shows that period effects were responsible for the overall decline in mortality rates at the population level, but Figure 4 shows that cohort effects, particularly in the smoking patterns of a country, undoubtedly play a role as well.

Week 4

by Carolyn Hughes -
Agreed--regarding challenging the assumption (or at least anchoring of the narrative) that the US tends to "lead" in trends in health, with other countries following, though I don't have much of a take on why, other than the fact that it seems like a lot of research/investigation is US-centered (like the previous readings on the origins of the demographic transition theory), so theories start with US data and then seem to be applied to other countries. I was similarly interested in the potential differences between Table 1 and the graphs in Figure 2. The authors used regression to find "dominant turning points" in death rate trends, which seem to be challenging to eyeball when looking at the Figure 2 graphs. Based on the text, Japan's death rate was declining before the US's (as you noted). However, unlike the other countries, the "dominant turning point" date in Table 1 for Japan relates to a flattening of the death rate (the others had turning points associated with more steep changes in mortality decline). It would be interesting to know more about that--what the origin of the early steep decline in death rates in Japan was related to.