▪️You’ve probably seen headlines and memes like this, claiming a crisis in maternal deaths doubling in the last 20 years. Our World in Data has a recent article debunking this quite convincingly, showing the increase is almost entirely due to changes in reporting.
▪️Decades ago, maternal deaths were primarily counted as those happening during childbirth or shortly after. This undercounted maternal deaths, as certain conditions like heart disease can be exacerbated by pregnancy, and there were instances when it wasn’t checked if a deceased woman was pregnant.
▪️Thus, there was a well-intentioned effort to fix this by instituting a checkbox on the death certificate for women, asking if they were pregnant, or recently pregnant (including up to one year after pregnancy). Not surprisingly, this substantially increased the amount of reported maternal deaths.
▪️Obscuring this increase was the fact that not every state adopted the checklist at once. It was a gradual process, beginning with 4 states in 2003, with all 50 joining by 2017. The aggregate national data appeared to show a steady increase, but was simply the result of more and more states adopting the checkbox.
▪️Looking state by state, the numbers would roughly double right after the checkbox, then plateau. There was no alarming increase in maternal mortality, just a one time blip from change in reporting.
▪️The new method also likely overstates maternal mortality by lumping some unrelated deaths (i.e. drug overdose) as maternal deaths. Audits have also found false positives and errors in box checking which inflated the numbers.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement
▪️It’s unsurprising that the media would cluelessly and uncritically run with these stories, but a bit disturbing that they took the lead from medical publications, which should know better.
So many of these right wing accounts are just whiners now, this is a diatribe about automatic sinks and towels, the horror! As I explained in a prior post, most of the newer terminals have great bathrooms, some now have completely private stalls and plenty of them. The worst and most crowded airport bathrooms are invariably found in aging terminals that are decades old. It’s a reminder that airports were usually drab and uncomfortable.
I think the heyday of the air hand-dryers was like 15-20 years ago, where often you couldn’t find real towels. Now you can at least usually get real paper towels in airport bathrooms. Remember those old cloth roller towels that would go in a loop and somehow “clean” themselves? Yuck! Public bathrooms have always been gross, it seems some are deliberately having selective memories.
Airport food and drinks were always expensive, but now practically everyone brings those huge cooler flasks with them and fills them up. So not sure what he means that ...
I first critiqued this terrible take by looking at how food has actually improved substantially. Even though I said the same could be done in every category, people said “you’re only doing food.” So let’s do air travel and see why it’s not gotten better, not worse.
▪️Aircraft have greatly improved. Just 15-20 years ago, many domestic routes (~15%) were flown by turboprops like the Brasilia, Dash 8 or Saab. Now, almost everything is in jets, and most aircraft have WiFi. Some even have Starlink, where you probably have faster WiFi than your home. Most major airlines offer dozens or hundreds of movies and shows to watch.
▪️Newer designs like the 787 have lower cabin altitudes and improved humidity, which make a huge difference in passenger comfort on long haul flights. The first/business class international market has gotten very competitive globally, with many carriers offering excellent service and amenities. Pods, suites, showers, etc. Coach still sucks but is dramatically cheaper ...
This is the complete opposite of an empirical fact. The right has now joined the left in being pessimistic about the modern world and completely unappreciative of the amazing abundance we now have. I’ll just focus on food here, but you could do it for almost every category.
▪️Fresh produce used to be available only in season. In the winter it was canned or frozen. People used to send fruit for Christmas gifts, it was that much of a luxury good. Now, you can get giant, sweet berries year around in every grocery store. Corn on the cob in February. Not to mention once rare items like dragon fruit, heirloom tomatoes or baby bok choy.
▪️If you didn’t live on the coast, seafood was either not available, frozen, or extremely expensive. If you lived in the Midwest and traveled to coastal locales you would quite literally be able to eat food you had never seen. Salmon has become much more abundant and accessible. You can get fresh ahi at Walmart today. Sushi and oyster bars exist everywhere ...
