Consider Reardon, Kalogrides & Shores (2019). They found that even in districts where lower-performing groups had higher SES than Whites, they still tended to perform worse.
In this picture, 79% of the mean Black-White gap is independent of SES. At the metro level, 62% was.
It is a pernicious myth that test scores and achievement gaps are mere reflections of geography and that geography plays a major causal role in test scores.
The truth is that their association primarily reflects selection.
College students make or are forced to make suboptimal choices about the times their classes take place🧵
For students who register for 8AM classes, about a third wake up after class starts, and almost 40% wake up too late to get to class on time.
People's internal rhythms aren't things they just choose, they're somewhat out of their control because they're synced up with day-night cycles.
Consider this, showing the amount of time 8AM class-takers sleep on school days vs weekends (gray), measured through logins at school.
If you compare those 8AM class-takers to 9AM students, you see that the ones who registered for 9AM classes sleep longer, but both sleep similar lengths on weekends.
"A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy."
Brian Thompson's murderer wrote that in his manifesto.
Both claims are bad. The first one, because America spends the most on healthcare because it's rich:
I don't mean Americans pay higher prices for the same amounts of care, but that Americans consume much higher volumes of care. They do more check-ups, get more screenings, take more tests, dose more drugs, get more surgeries... and so on!
You can predict spending from volumes:
Regarding the second claim, Americans have shorter lifespans because they're fat, violent, and reckless, not because of things that the health system can control.
And, if anything, when it comes to the things the health system actually controls, they generally do better!
In Medicare Advantage, the government encourages insurers to pursue perverse incentives.
These see them overdiagnosing patients for conditions they often do not have, and which they don't recommend treating, because it means they can send the government a bigger bill.
Insurers have tried to claim that they don't do this, and that this data misrepresents the care they provide to patients they diagnose with particular conditions (like HIV!) because COVID disrupted care, but they're lying and it's too obvious.
Medicare Advantage does beat FFS on performance and on cost, and it certainly leads to more care for tons of people, but like every major program in medicine, it gets defrauded to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.