For conservatives, it must sound like “better red than dead” all over again. A new study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health suggests that liberals live longer than conservatives in the United States. The researchers looked at more than 32,000 adults and tracked them over 15 years. The result was surprising: conservatives seemed to be expiring faster than their counterparts on the left. However, conservatives claimed to be happier than their counterparts in life.
It has been reported that Hillary Clinton has been working on a new campaign theme. Perhaps they should consider a “Vote Hillary Or Die” campaign.
Roman Pabayo, a community health researcher at the University of Nevada said that the group relied on more concrete data like actual death records than did prior studies. They also eliminated other factors by comparing conservatives and liberals of similar age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Notably, when divided simply between parties, Democratic and Republican party members died at the same rate, but when compared on ideological grounds, conservatives bit the dust first on average.
Subu V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at Harvard was critical of the findings. His study relied on self-reporting and found that Republicans reported better health and they were 15% less likely to smoke. He also found that Republicans and conservatives were benefitted by being more religious and “more tied into social networks and organizations.”
It may still be too early for some conservatives to embrace wage equity and global warming. The difference in death rates is described by Subramanian as “slight” in the new study.
Source: USA Today
“This makes the survey garbage.”
Exactly so.
This is a BMJ product (the British Medical Journal).
It tells me a lot of that of the reviewers did not make the authors report this as a possible alternative explanation in their conclusion.
As a result, this tells me that the reviewers chosen must be rather stupid, or mendacious, or both.
Conservatives live in the past (literally)
One of the most ignorant comments so far today, but it’s early.
Wrong in many ways: ideologically false, and physically impossible (i.e, no one can literally live in the past, it being past and all.
Conservatives live in the past (literally), liberals look to the future. Living in the past can’t be very healthy for you mentally or physically..
A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology and even traits like physiology and genetics.
The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.
The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.)
http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/17/scientists-are-beginning-to-figure-out-why-conservatives-are%E2%80%A6-conservative/
So when I say conservatives live in the past, I mean the past……eons ago. And maybe that’s why evolution seems so foreign to them.
Lloyd – you link an article by a super liberal to prove a point about conservatives? Really? Moyers is not to be believed. I have more confidence in the HuffPost.
“Different people were included each year, so the survey is not a panel design.”
This makes the survey garbage. You can’t base a trend with different (new) research subjects each year. Statistically, this is trash.
In statistics and econometrics, the term panel data refers to multi-dimensional data frequently involving measurements over time. Panel data contain observations of multiple phenomena obtained over multiple time periods for the same firms or individuals.
Math is hard and Gruber is right.
Gerald Dolan, LOL!! SS Disability is up 20% under Obama. He has been raiding the SS Retirement Fund[people who work!!] to pay the bankrupt Disability Fund. Congress is putting an end to that raid. Obama will have a hissy fit for sure.
The Harvard guy points out the dirty secret that liberals are big smokers. Our prez still lights up according to Billy Joel. The footage of Obama chewing that Nicorette in India was hilarious. This is not a slam. I quit smoking and it was tough. It was so tough I NEVER had another puff of tobacco. No way I was going through that again. But, back to our prez still liking to bang heaters. He meticulously and sanctimoniously watches everything he eats. Yet, he still smokes. What’s up w/ that?
Paul:
Religious affiliation hazard ratios (less than 1 = lower risk, >1 = higher risk)
None (ref) 1.00
Protestant 1.10
Catholic 0.98
Jewish 0.91
Eastern 0.47
Other 0.92
Liberals outlive Conservatives because Conservatives work themselves to death trying to support themselves, their families and all the freeloaders in the country.
Pogo – where did you see the stuff on atheists?
I see no raw data here. As we know from experience, the media is the WRONG place to get health advice from.
And by this study, it was worse to be an atheist.
Well Republicans certainly seem to be happy on this blog. Perhaps that’s because there are lots of them to agree with each other. I’ll be dancing on graves. Watch the SNL skit. It says it all.
John Belushi ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’
http://www.hulu.com/watch/97833
Put in address bar.
So the old fart in front of you going 25 mph in the fast lane is probably a liberal who thinks he’s the only one that matters and it’s ok
Tarnation!
Political party affiliation, political ideology and mortality
http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/01/06/jech-2014-204803.full?sid=67988a8e-1765-4b34-9400-107fbfa8d7c2“>Political party affiliation, political ideology and mortality
The study:
Political party affiliation, political ideology and mortality
Roman Pabayo1,2, Ichiro Kawachi2, Peter Muennig3
http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/01/06/jech-2014-204803.full?sid=67988a8e-1765-4b34-9400-107fbfa8d7c2
1. The difference in mortality disappeared when controlled for sex, race, education, religious affiliation, age, household income, and marital status.
The authors felt it did not, but the numbers are a yawn.
Being black was a far bigger health risk.
2. “Different people were included each year, so the survey is not a panel design.”
So although the General Social Survey (GSS), the survey used to determine party affiliation, was linked to the US National Death Index, left unexplained was how they tied one survey result to that one person’s death. Moreover, it also failed to consider that political party affiliation may have changed in the years studied (given that they are not actually following individual people (a “panel”) over time.
3. “These findings from an American population-based and representative sample are discordant with previous identified relationships between political ideology and health observed in the USA,3 ,6 Europe2 ,4 ,5 and Japan.1”
This is junk.
From the USA Today article:
One researcher not involved in the new study is unconvinced. The death differences found are “very small” and the idea that self-reported health is not a good predictor of death is “very inconsistent” with other research, says Subu V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at Harvard.
His study of Republicans and Democrats not only found that Republicans reported better health but that they were 15% less likely to smoke. Smoking is a major cause of illness and death.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/28/liberals-outlive-conservatives/22478999/
Hmmm. Something a bit funny in this study. There was no difference between Democrats and Republicans. The difference was between conservative or liberal independents.
“While there was no difference in time to death between participants affiliated with the Democrat and Republican parties, participants who described themselves as “independents” were significantly less likely to die during the study period. … This difference became apparent after the researchers adjusted the data for individual variables such as age, sex, education and household income. However, participants identifying as liberal were less likely to die early compared with moderates or conservatives. This finding remained the same after adjusting the data for individual variables.”
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/288709.php
When the study analyzed life expectancy, did it include the unborn children killed by liberals?
I’ll always remember Dennis Leary’s take on this. If I can die younger and miss out on the dialysis, pooping in a diaper drooling over myself while sitting in a day room years, count me in.