Thursday, 13 September 2012

Dispatches from the front: Public Health edition

As semester constraints continue to bind, please enjoy this little interlude in our regular programming. The #PHC2012 hashtag captures tweets from attendees at the 2012 Population Health Congress in Adelaide. A few conference highlights (I'm not attending; I don't get invited to those shin-digs), from attendees via the Twitter feed. I'm surprised that Adelaide didn't collapse under the cloud of smug.
What?

In Australia? Really? I'd bet pretty heavily against it.

Recall Blakely's prior work in this area. [and here]. I like increased life expectancy, so long as it's not achieved by forcing people to lead bland lives. The stream seemed to suggest worries about ecological footprints and life expectancy.


I'm trying!

Wilkinson, of The Spirit Level, was keynote. Recall that The Spirit Level was completely debunked by Chris Snowdon (on the right) and is viewed as unreliable by Andrew Leigh. Leigh wrote:
One set of arguments suggests that we should care about inequality for what are called ‘instrumental reasons’. Inequality, some contend, is associated with worse outcomes in areas that society cares about, such as health, crime, savings and growth. This argument is put most strongly in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It is an argument that I used to believe. Indeed, I deeply want to be true, but my own research persuades me otherwise.[25] The closer you get to these asserted effects, the more fragile are the findings. If there are negative effects of inequality on those social outcomes, they must be extremely small. (There are also small positive effects. For example, my own work shows that inequality boosts growth, though the trickle-down process is slow.)
And, recall that Justin Wolfers destroyed the "not lead to happiness" result:
Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive link between average levels of subjective well-being and GDP per capita across countries, and find no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective well-being. We show that the estimated relationship is consistent across many datasets and is similar to that between subjective well-being and income observed within countries. Finally, examining the relationship between changes in subjective
well-being and income over time within countries, we find economic growth associated with rising happiness. Together these findings indicate a clear role for absolute income and a more limited role for relative income comparisons in determining happiness.
Back to the twitter stream:



Prepare to be managed.


Yes. Very brave.

I assume they're looking to ban ads for fatty foods and that they're not trying to cancel reruns of Roseanne.


Ummm.... if they mean an arms-length body like Pharmac for funding decisions, that's totally justifiable. But I'm not sure that's what's here advocated.

I think this is a KPI for some folks.

Did Otago get a grant for this? Weeping.

And so you have a little glimpse into the world that the Public Health advocates are trying to bring forth.
Posted by Eric Crampton at 11:14:00 6 Comments
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