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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

tracing back to the source of the chart...

>Cass calls this calculation the Cost-of-Thriving Index. It measures the median male annual salary against four major household expenditures:

> • Housing, defined as the annual rent for a three-bedroom house in the 40th percentile of the local housing market.

> • Health care, defined as the annual premium on a typical family health insurance policy.

> • Transportation, defined as the average cost of owning and operating a car driven 15,000 miles per year.

> • Education, defined as the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board at a four-year public college.

Why is education being overweight by a factor of several times? The other items are the annual cost of expenses that you incur annually. But education is only incurred 4 years out of the 80 years you're alive. Giving them the same weight as the other items is ridiculously misleading.

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Here is the rationale given in the source paper: https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/t...

quoting from paper:

Basket Component: One Semester of Public College

Source: The COTI uses the federal National Center for Education Statistics estimate for total tuition, fees, room, and board at a four-year public institution. 67

Rationale: Two children pursuing four-year degrees would require a combined 16 semesters of college, so a household preparing for those costs would need to save roughly one semester’s worth of cost per year before the children reached college age. (While the savings might ideally earn a positive return in the interim, that return would need to be quite strong just to keep pace with the rate of increase in tuition over the same period.)

The one-semester estimate may overstate costs in some respects—for instance, a family would likely have 20 or more years between the birth of a first child and the college graduation of a second. And in practice, many children do not ultimately attend college (though a small and, it seems likely in recent decades, declining share has chosen from a young age not to consider that path). But it also understates costs by considering only public college costs; private college costs are more than twice as high.68 Note also that the cost of public college tuition already incorporates the substantial public subsidy provided by the state government.

> > • Education, defined as the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board at a four-year public college.

> What is education being overweight by a factor of several times? The other items are the annual cost of expenses that you incur every year. But education is only incurred 4 years out of the 80 years you're alive. Giving them the same weight as the other items is ridiculously misleading.

That is strange. Education is also an oddly priced expenditure because the nameplate tuition is not the price paid by most students. It would be a lot better to use the the net price, which is much lower, but is harder to collect.

Development and economic growth.

In the Roman Empire, people lived 30 years and died. Most were illiterate. As a society develops, and has more excess resources, allocating more and more of those resources on keeping people alive, healthy, and educated seems reasonable.

What's missing from the charts is quality. We spend a lot on healthcare, but we also now have multi-million-dollar MRIs machines and similar magic.

What you said is WILDLY wrong.

People in Roman empire lived until 90 just like us. For example Seneca de Elder was 92 when he died.

The reason why "life expectance" was 30 years was because child deaths, since that number is just an average.

If you have 2 people living in a country, one is 100, and the other is 0, and the child dies, life expectancy is 50.

if you ignore infant mortality, life expectancy was late 50s during Ancient Rome times.

not too bad.

I don't believe your number. Citation required. And I'm serious about that. I'm sure it's possible to get that number somehow, but the devil is in the details.

Do you factor in:

- Famines?

- Wars?

- Being killed by bandits?

- Are you talking about the city of Rome? Italy? Gaul?

- Just rich people, or do you include folks like slaves?

- Etc.

If you're going to accuse me of giving bad information, you'll need to provide better information. And from there, you need to count on dubious records. I took my number from Crash Course history (the unit on the middle ages), but it meets what I'd previously read across multiple credible sources.

this is direct from wikipedia's article on ancient roman demographics. first result on google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire....

I figured. Google it, find the first random web page, and type it in.

This article is a summary of one random historian, Frier.

Probably better summary of evidence:

https://archive.org/details/demographyromans0000park/page/20...

"We have a single papyrus record of 122 individuals listed in a register of taxes. Of these 122, 85 have ages extant. ... only 8 are over the age of 49 years, and only 2 of those are over 54"

"average life expectance at age 15 range from 8.3 to 15.4 years."

Etc. There's a broad set of estimates, but the estimate of 50 years is simply not plausible, unless you're talking about the wealthy elite. Being poor in Rome sucked.

And with Rome, I guess that's usually the case.

I'll mention: For all the talk of infant mortality, most infant deaths in history weren't recorded. The figure everyone tosses around -- 28 years -- sort of already takes that into account.

I've given up on editing bad Wikipedia pages a long time ago.

There was a random process. Plenty of people lived to be 90, and plenty of people died at birth.

The difference was that a random cut could turn into an infection and kill you. Hannibal lost vision in one eye due to an infection. Prior to antibiotics, you never knew if an infection would:

- Pass;

- Disable you; or

- Kill you

Same thing for a lot of other medical issues, as well as non-medical ones (such as a famine, bandits, or a random army passing through).

> In 2017, health-care spending in the United States came to $10,207 per capita. Germany, on the other hand, spent $5, 848 on health care for each of its citizens. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/22/germany-health-care-system-c...

Germans must do without those fancy MRI machines after all... oh wait they have those two. So what’s the catch? Maybe they have fewer people covered? No, not that either:

> Despite spending less per capita, Germany still manages to cover 100% of its population. In the United States, about 8.8% of the population remains uninsured, which equates to about 28 million people. Even more people are underinsured.

What they have less off is overhead. They do have a shortage of doctors, but not due to costs of becoming one - education is either free or nearly free (especially by US standards).

> Tuition loans of over $200,000 are not uncommon for students in the US after graduating from medical schools, which are often private institutions. In Germany, however, the vast majority of medical universities are tax-funded and, for this reason, free of tuition. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5617919/

So we probably have more than enough money in the system already to treat every single one of US citizen, maintain great care and not close local hospitals, but we are too busy allowing profits and helping doctors pay back mega education loans.

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