Curmudgeon Joy

On Poll Pot.

Ms Toynbee works on that fantastic assumption underlying the ideal of universal education, that everyone can be and wants to be and therefore should be educated. But what room does this leave for natural stupidity and wilful ignorance?

And on the subject of inequality, Dalrymple on health inequalites :

In the first place, it is assumed that relative figures are more important than absolute ones. The fact that the life expectancies of every social class had risen, and the infant mortality rates of every social class had fallen, was detectable only from the figures in the article, and not from anything in the text. In this context, it is always ratios that are considered important. The national average for infant mortality is approximately 5 per 1000 live births: that for the worst areas, 17 per cent higher, is therefore approximately 6 per thousand. The absolute difference is thus 1 per thousand live births.

Of course, the death of every individual child is lamentable; but since we are talking in terms of abstract categories and statistics, not in terms of newspaper sob stories, this difference hardly seems to me to be one requiring enormous social engineering, which always has great costs and unforeseen consequences.

It is interesting to note in the article that only certain disparities are deemed worthy of epidemiological notice and hence of efforts at social engineering. It is well-known, for example, though seldom publicised, that the mortality rates of illegitimate children are considerably higher than those of legitimate children; and since illegitimacy, even in these times of mass bastardy, is concentrated in the lower reaches of society, it might account for a considerable part of statistical disparity alluded to. But such a consideration would lead to very different kinds of social engineering from that envisaged by the British Medical Journal, and is therefore simply not mentioned.