Healthy Immigrants and NYC life expectancy

Preston and Elo attributed a big share of NYC improvements to immigrants in a Popul Devel Rev piece published earlier this year. They wrote a little about health care, but more prominent in the tale were public health campaigns against HIV, homicides, and smoking. What, no calories or soda?

Bringing it home

The Times reports speculation on changing city climates over the next 40 years, a deft way of literally bringing the effects of climate change home for Americans. Could cities like Detroit benefit from being less hard hit?

Reforestation and climate change

An assistant prof at Yale makes the case for caution, citing several counterintuitive patterns in the data.

IOM weighs in on end-of-life

A new IOM report calls for change, per the Times. It's easy to see how fee-for-service reimbursement structures might produce too much hospital care and not necessarily enough sustenance of quality of remaining life.

Actuarial estimates of NFL brain injuries

The Times reported some startling statistics from the NFL concussion settlement.  Described as conservative by the NFL team, numbers like these are still pretty scary:

"The N.F.L.’s actuaries assumed that 28 percent of all players would be found to have one of the compensable diseases and that the league would pay out $900 million to them. Their calculations showed that players younger than 50 had an 0.8 percent chance of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia, compared with less than 0.1 percent for the general population. For players ages 50 to 54, the rate was 1.4 percent, compared with less than 0.1 percent for the general population. The gap between the players and the general population grows wider with increasing age."

Krugman on Scotland

He advises against Scottish independence in its current proposed form, seeing little wisdom in a currency union without a fiscal union based on the Euro Zone's recent experience.