help jerome scuggs become smart

[Ephemeral]

The way to approach it is to look at how poverty levels relate to the death rates in various countries over a good span of time (factor out numbers/countries that have wars and other varibles that might impact death rates).
Perhaps use the WHO (World Health Org) site for poverty stats and the CDC site probably has death rates. Demostrate a trend for the two stats and you are done.

[Vykromond]

The way to approach it is to look at how poverty levels relate to the death rates in various countries over a good span of time (factor out numbers/countries that have wars and other varibles that might impact death rates).
Perhaps use the WHO (World Health Org) site for poverty stats and the CDC site probably has death rates. Demostrate a trend for the two stats and you are done.

This won't work all that well either. It's not a simple problem. Take X African country suffering from a widespread AIDS epidemic over a number of years. Is AIDS spreading more because of poverty? Yes, probably. To what extent? Are deaths from AIDS then attributable to poverty, or disease? How many? Hell, what about wars and civil wars instigated by countries whose populations in dire economic hardship? Are those deaths "from poverty"?

Of course you could "factor out" countries that have issues like this, but then you end up "factoring out" everywhere where poverty is actually a primary social issue.

You could certainly prove with such a method that increased poverty correlates to an increased death rate but your results would not give a meaningful estimate of what Jerome is asking about.

[Jerome Scuggs]

I think it's a question of "had this person more money, could he/she have been saved?"

http://www.drs.org.au/wwwboard/messages/85.html

33k children per day.... excellent.

The children who die and could be saved are almost 100% poor and of
those who survive, we must ask why 500,000 are left blind every year
for lack of a simple vitamin which costs less than a pack of
cigarettes per year? Why are 200 million children under five years
of age undernourished? Why are there 250 million children and
adolescents working? Why do 110 million not attend primary school
and 275 million fail to attend secondary school? Why do two million
girls become prostitutes each year? Why in this world -- which
already produces almost 30 trillion dollars worth of goods and
services per year -- do one billion 300 million human beings live in
absolute poverty, receiving less than a dollar a day -- when there
are those who receive more than a million dollars a day? Why do 800
million lack the most basic health services? Why is it that of the
50 million people who die each year in the world, whether adults or
children, 17 million -- that is approximately 50,000 per day -- die
of infectious diseases which could almost all be cured -- or, even
better, be prevented -- at a cost which is sometimes no more than one
dollar per person?

[DankNuggets]

how are these sources even reporting poverty? In the US i think the poverty level is somewhere around 10,000-12,000 dollars a year, but it's definitely not the same amount of money for all countries, unless you consider 90+% of a country in poverty. Is it a certain percentage of the per capita income?

Could it be that these people are considered impoverished not because of income (you could live in a commune as an extreme ex.) but becaue of a lack of access to information and health care? AIDS spreads through "impoverished" countries so easily because people 1) don't know they have AIDS, 2) don't even know what HIV/AIDS is, 3) don't know how to prevent transmission, 4) don't have access to condoms or want to practice abstinence, or 5) they're born with it

but since your paper seems to be focusing on povety in western society, the best place to look for stats might be something like census.gov to see how many people are below the poverty line and if you're lucky they might have a section that shows how likely one is to die from any random event (don't know what website it was but i remember it from a report i did in hs - it shows the odds of everything from a plain crashing to drowning)

[Ephemeral]

This won't work all that well either. It's not a simple problem. Take X African country suffering from a widespread AIDS epidemic over a number of years. Is AIDS spreading more because of poverty? Yes, probably. To what extent? Are deaths from AIDS then attributable to poverty, or disease? How many? Hell, what about wars and civil wars instigated by countries whose populations in dire economic hardship? Are those deaths "from poverty"?

Of course you could "factor out" countries that have issues like this, but then you end up "factoring out" everywhere where poverty is actually a primary social issue.

You could certainly prove with such a method that increased poverty correlates to an increased death rate but your results would not give a meaningful estimate of what Jerome is asking about.

Understood, but respectfully disagree. Proper statistical analysis and trending the data should make the numbers meaningful enough to appease most teachers. My opinion is that the teacher is looking for the effort and a creative approach to the problem and not going to try to poke huge holes in the details.
But it is just my opinion and I could be wrong.

[Vykromond]

That's a good point Eph- honestly, I got sidetracked and forgot the fact that the goal in sight was a school paper and not a treatise.