[continued]

The policy implications are surely to target health policy at a particular section of the total population, Black and White, not the working population but the welfare-embedded population. The working population is doing fine. Then health professionals, i.e the genuine and competent ones, might get somewhere, instead of - as Polpak alludes to - one Indigenous population parasiting off another for their cushy life-time jobs, while the target population wallows in its poor health and parasites, for life, off the rest of Australia.

Discuss.

Well, Loudmouth the paper you linked to indicates the difference between traditional hunter gatherer societies and acculturated societies is not very much and mostly at the young end. The reduction in probability is 3-fold at most. There is almost no difference between acculturated societies and Sweden in 1900 in terms of death risk at any age. I doubt there was much welfare oriented behaviour in Sweden in 1900.

So I think your hypothesis needs some modification.

Well, no, Agromonist, it's just that relatively low life expectancy is, for very different reasons, relatively common to both 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' and peasant societies.

In other words, relatively similar outcomes, from very different causes.

I stress 'relatively' because I suspect that most peasant societies have a statistically better health profile (but perhaps a worse disease and infant-mortality profile) than 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' or anybody living in conditions of lousy diet, no employment, no exercise, low-opportunity and low-interest-in-opportunity - what Oscar Lewis, the Marxist anthropologist, called a 'culture of poverty' and what I would call a welfare-oriented population.

Lewis posited that socialism or a strong welfare system, might help people get up and out of a 'culture of poverty' but I'm not so sure, it seems to work the other way around. So he might have got that wrong, and I think he was realising that towards the end of his short life, working in 'socialist' Cuba in the late sixties.

But let's not forget that only about a third of the Australian Indigenous population - maybe half at a pinch - is living in this way. The scandal is that so many Indigenous professionals, on good salaries, are wasting their careers maintaining the welfare system as it is, in a devil's bargain in which the welfare-oriented clientele pretend to be trying to do something, while the professionals pretend that it is all about to work, just around the corner.

And nothing changes, or improves. Check out how many Indigenous health organisations there are, hundreds if not thousands across Australia, and the health of the 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' improves not one bit, year after year. Scandalous.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Indigenous population gets on with business. Thirty thousand university graduates by the end of this year.

Joe

I don’t know, Loudmouth. You suspect a lot, but the data you pointed to suggests the opposite. It has curves for probability of death at each age. Those for acculturated hunter-gather societies and for Sweden in 1900 are virtually identical. So, it is probably unlikely aboriginal people have a worse infant mortality profile than inhabitants of Sweden in 1900.

If you want to put forward a different hypothesis to the one in the paper you linked to, you will need some other data. Random pontifications based on your prejudices won’t cut it. So where is this data that shows any of your thoughts have merit?

Well, Sweden in 1800, not 1900, for one thing, Agrominist. That's the problem with logarithmic scales as in 1 (B) which you seem to be going on, they can give the impression of roughly similar rates. Check them again, and have a good look at Fig. 2.

The grim reality has been that, life is very hard and usually short in hunter-gatherer societies, and has not been a bed of roses for 'acculturated hunter-gatherers' either. Peasant societies, such as Sweden up to 1900, and Japan until much later, have provided more reliable food supplies than hunter-gatherer societies could - that's no fault of theirs - but still had much more primitive disease prevention mechanisms in 1900 than were available to us fifty and a hundred years later.

The upshot is that public health measures, and advances in medical remediation have been phenomenal over the past century, and that life expectancy has risen from, say, 35-40-odd in hunter-gatherer societeies, to 47-50 in peasant societies and early industrial societies in 1840 or 1850, to 80-85 in highly industrialised societies today. As well, working life has become much less physical, less life-threatening.

One could extrapolate from the article and suggest that life expectancy improved by about one month every 10,000 years in our common ancestral hunter-gatherer societies, by perhaps one year in every thousand years in agricultural society, and - as the article asserts - by around three months for every year in industrial society, since 1840. "Stunningly linear".

In amongst all that, the life expectancy for 'acculturated hunter-gatherers', i.e. ex-hunter-gatherers, has improved slightly to roughly approximate the rates attained in peasant societies. And there it has tended to stay. At least, current Indigenous health findings suggest that to be the case. Do you dispute any of this ?

Cheers,

Joe

The ABS has just published data on non-school qualifications at the 2011 Census. It counted more than 29,400 Indigenous people with university-level qualifications (i.e. more or less as at the end of 2010), ten thousand more than at the 2006 Census.

The total DEEWR figures for the period 2006-2010 were far lower, with barely six thousand new Indigenous under-graduates recorded, so the ABS figures - self-reporting rather than relying on univeries' print-outs - are up to fifty per cent higher than the DEEWR figures.

In 2011 itself, according to DEEWR, 1742 Indigenous people graduated. Taking those figures at face-value, and assuming that the graduate numbers for 2012 will be similar, then by the end of this year, close to thirty three thousand Indigenous people will have university qualifications.

If we go back to 1975, less than forty years ago, the number of Indigenous tertiary graduates was barely one hundred. What made the difference ? Moving to, and growing up in, cities certainly helped, but the more immediate cause, I strongly believe, was the institution of support programs, to prepare Indigenous students for enrolment in mainstream programs of study and providing social and academic support throughout their study. Without those programs, I suggest that the total number of graduates could still be well under ten thousand.

Thirty three thousand graduates: to put that in perspective, there are around 280,000 Indigenous adults over 22. So one in every 8.5 Indigenous adults is a university graduate.

Women graduates outnumber men two-to-one, so one in six or seven Indigenous women is a graduate.

Urban populations are far more likely to contain graduates, so perhaps one in five urban Indigenous women is a university graduate.

By the way, those Indigenous women graduates are far more likely to marry non-Indigenous colleagues and work-mates, perhaps 90 %.

And since Indigenous communities are too incapacitated and disinclined to make any effort to attract Indigenous graduates, male or female, except in Health or SocialWork, those women are likely to remain in the cities - after all, most of them these days were born and raised there.

Love Censuses !