Re:A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
by zeroname on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @01:02PM
(#19145840)
> This simply isn't true. Between 1900 and 1905, Sweden's infant mortality rate was merely 2.3 per 1,000 live births [1] which is basically the same as they currently report (2.6 per 1,000 [2])
You're mixing up maternal mortality (the mother dies) with infant mortality (the child dies).
It would be quite remarkable indeed if somehow medicine in Sweden today achieved a slightly worse infant mortality than at the beginning of the previous century.
This simply isn't true. Between 1900 and 1905, Sweden's infant mortality rate was merely 2.3 per 1,000 live births [1] which is basically the same as they currently report (2.6 per 1,000 [2]) according to the CIA world factbook. Compare that with Lesotho's rate of 46.1 per 1,000 [2] and it's plain to aee that comparison is completely unfounded. Today's poorest countries have rates in the 60-80 range despite the best efforts of the Western world to share the basic knowledge which caused such a precipitous decline in infant mortality post-1850 with those nations.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448444/
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_...