Program Review
For this program review I listened to a podcast on www.econtalk.org. The podcast was called “Deaton on Health, Wealth, and Poverty.” I listened to it online, at my house, on November 18th. I choose this topic because it was an hour long program about the standard of living, helping poorer countries with health care, the GDP, happiness, and foreign aid. I thought this was a very good program to review because we talk about most of these topics in class and I wanted to get a better understanding of them.
The podcast started out introducing the host and the interviewee, as well as the interviewee’s credentials. The first topic discussed was about life expectancy and how it is constantly growing. They said that there is now a 50/50 chance of girls born today to make it to one hundred years old; compared to 2 girls out of 5000 in 1910. This is because of many things people take for granted. Changing sheets at a hotel between guests, getting a flu shot, and having filtered water were not a norms back then. The main reason life expectancy has risen throughout the years is discovering how to decrease the infant mortality rate. Also discussed what will be improved next, and they used cancer as an example. They said they think in the next 50 years they think the war against cancer will be cheaper and almost to an end. The next question asked if there was a ceiling to life expectancy and surprisingly they said maybe not. The growth rate has been constant at about every four years the life expectancy goes up by one year. The reasoning behind that is because people want to live longer and so a lot of money goes into health. A controversial topic that was mentioned was if more money should be spent more on men’s health because they statistically don’t live as long as women. The topic on life expectancy lead to the next topic, should we help poorer countries with health care. They stated facts about how the United States has spent over five trillion dollars...