Thread : this is going to be my penultimate post on Swedish mortality & covid. After SCB's next update, Jan 18th, we can consider the prel. numbers for all cause mortality 2020 fully stable, and I will then do a final update. What follows below, is still subject to minor updates.

2/n: To get ahead of media, who no doubt any hour now will report "Sweden has highest number of deaths since 1918!", here's what the absolute deaths deaths look like:
3/n: So expect media headlines painting Sweden as "The World's Cautionary Tale". However, with a little bit of thought and analysis, we might reach different conclusions... Let's first take population size into account:
4/n: when adjusting for population, 2020 as we speak (remember, the numbers are not fully finalized yet) has mortality on par with 2015. Can you spot the two outliers...? (hint: 2020 is not one of them).
5/n: As I've mentioned earlier, it's not enough to adjust for population - different years have quite different demographics in terms of age. So we need to take that into account, by adjusting for age:
6/n: Another way we can illustrate the importance of age is by looking at the proportion of deaths - actually: the proportion survivors - in a number of age intervals (I'm using only 4 age intervals, since that's how the SCB prel data are presented): Can you spot the outlier...?
7/n: Finally, let's look at one of those very popular Linear Regression models for Swedish deaths: first, non-age-adj. mortality 2010-2020 : can you spot any outliers...?
8/8: And lastly, a Linear Regression for age-adj mortality: again, can you spot any outliers...?

As mentioned, in a week, I'll do one more posting. After that, I'm off Twitter & most other social media.
@threadreaderapp unroll, pls.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x