Comment by onlyrealcuzzo
16 hours ago
That's a bleak view. I doubt a substantial percentage of smokers are smoking specifically to die sooner.
Most of them are smoking primarily because they're addicted.
A few of them actually like smoking.
16 hours ago
That's a bleak view. I doubt a substantial percentage of smokers are smoking specifically to die sooner.
Most of them are smoking primarily because they're addicted.
A few of them actually like smoking.
Dying sooner is certainly not why they started.. rather the bleakness of outlook is a (fairly rational) reason why they don’t quit.
If obesity is supposed to be the other main candidate for why life expectancy is down, you can do a similar analysis there. Is life really good enough to prolong or attempt to improve for people that are in at-risk categories? That’s the question people are looking at when they choose to move towards or away from self-care. For someone who makes minimum wage and already has to choose between paying for a date or paying for rent, it makes less sense for them to care much about losing weight, because it makes a bad life longer but won’t help their love life.
This is how practically all population-level analysis of health is just economics in disguise, even without directly looking at costs of medicine/services