My father, who was a rural mail man, and the local Missouri Synod minister organized a Great Books club in our village in my youth. They and their friends thoroughly enjoyed it. We are talking about a farming community of 500 – over a hundred miles from a city of even 50,000. (Nebraska a few years ago – perhaps still – had more school districts than all but one other state, even though its population is a million and a half. Towns & school districts are small.) The contempt some modern scholars have for such ambitions, delights, and approaches has often bothered me. Some draw back with horror from the Arnoldian vision, but its tough respect for all of us is one of our richest heritages.
Society
The “Public Health” Non Sequitur — Part II
Dr. Kevin Fleming blogs about Nazis and the Health Care Nannies. Worth reading.
Previous posts:
The “Public Health” Non Sequitur
Is this a great country or what?
Made-in-Texas tahina with kosher certification.
The “Public Health” Non Sequitur
Clayton Cramer criticizes Arthur Kellerman’s objection to home defibrillators:
So what device is it that Arthur Kellerman wanted the government to block you from having? No, not a gun. He was resisting government approval of automated external defibrillators (AEDs). His reasoning about AEDs is as specious as his reasoning about guns.
[. . .]Kellerman says. “If you have $2,000 burning a hole in your pocket, join a health club; get help stopping smoking; get help lowering your cholesterol. Sure, AEDs have saved hundreds of lives. But we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives with primary prevention of heart disease. And we don’t know whether having an AED in the home will make a family less interested in prevention.”
Kellerman’s statement — “Sure, AEDs have saved hundreds of lives. But we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives with primary prevention of heart disease” — is an excellent example of a logical fallacy that is popular among “helping professions” busybodies. It takes the general form: You shouldn’t do X for yourself. We should do Y as a society. These statements are typically made sequentially, and appear to respond to objections but really do nothing more than brush them off.
The problem is that the statements are not logically connected. X does not imply Y, nor are X and Y necessarily mutually exclusive. In this case, Kellerman does not explain why individuals’ purchasing of their own defibrillators is incompatible with improved preventive-medicine or public-health measures. By presenting preventive medicine as a false alternative to individual behavior that he disapproves, he appears to suggest that either 1) he does not believe that individuals have as much standing to make their own medical and insurance decisions as do bureaucrats, institutions and academic researchers, 2) he is arguing dishonestly, or 3) he is extremely sloppy in his thinking. Whatever his motives, his arguments deserve close scrutiny, especially since he has made similar badly reasoned arguments against individual decision-making in the past.
When confronted with a public-health non sequitur, or any argument that uses group data to prescribe (or proscribe) individual behavior, be alert to the possibility of statistical and logical sleight-of-hand. Often, the biggest questions concern who gets to decide rather than which decisions to make. The most important part of Kellerman’s argument may be the unstated (and hence unexamined) premise that he should decide for you.
Quote of the Day
The social good that a small government politician does is only partially captured by current mechanisms while the social good that a big government politician does is counted and counted again as it’s the gross good, not the net that gets credited to him. Indirect, negative private effects are seldom linked unless they are very obvious and such negative effects often take many years to show up as Atlee in the UK and Wagner in NYC played to their benefit.