Obesity Expenses Examined, and Other Links
Nearly 17 percent of U.S. medical costs can be blamed on obesity. The added cost to a person’s annual medical bill exceeds $2,800.
Marriage and divorce rates have remained remarkably immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle. Decline in marriage is concentrated entirely among women with less education — those who likely have the least to gain from modern “hedonic” marriage.
Why do you have to take antibiotics for 7 days? Because of the Roman emperor Constantine.
I didn’t know that Constantine invented the 7-day week. I always thought it had something to do with Genesis and the creation story.
Zero and infinity can often be just as arbitrary, when chosen as “natural” sounding answers to ambiguous questions. The abortion question is one such example– nobody can pinpoint an exact time when a mass of cells becomes a person, so they tend toward the extremes.
Fifty percent is another number given mystical meaning, especially in the subject of elections. Early Greek elections were of the Yes/No variety, so the winner obviously had a majority of the vote. But when there are more than two choices, there is no way to guarantee a 50% majority without artificially creating one. But the method used to manufacture the majority– typically a runoff election– defines a completely different meaning for the word “majority”, so the whole thing is based on a fallacy of equivocation as well as one of circular reasoning.
I just read a blog post claiming over-medication of the elderly might exceed $80 billion per year. Can we blame that on the Roman emperor Constantine?
The problem with obesity is not it’s cost. The problem is that the people who generate the cost are not paying their own way. They are shifting costs to the rest of us.
In the obesity study, it was a few very high BMI individuals that were driving most of the costs.