Mumble, Mumble, Curse, Curse

Or how economics is still dominated by psuedo-scientific charlatans..

Alex Tabbarok posts an excerpt promoting his and Tyler Cowen's new Macroecon book:

In the United States, diarrhea is a pain, an annoyance, and of course an embarrassment. In much of the developing world, diarrhea is a killer, especially of children. Every year 1.8 million children die from diarrhea. Ending the premature deaths of these children does not require any scientific breakthroughs, nor does it require new drugs or fancy medical devices. Preventing these deaths requires only one thing: economic growth.

A typical dishonest bit of libertarian religious hucksterism. Most severe infant diarrhea is due to unclean water and eliminated by supplying clean water. Not that economic growth is unrelated to infant mortality - but it's a long term and indirect effect.

The rest of the text of the chapter is better. The strong actual correlation is to per capita gdp, and it's shown in several graphs,but even it is hardly ironclad. A very poor country like Cuba has very low infant mortality, while the very rich Saudi Arabia has high infant mortality. Portugal is much poorer than the US, but has much lower infant mortality. It's not just how much money you have, it's how you choose to deploy it.

As usual, a quick lesson in most of the pertinent statistics can be had at Gapminder.

Economic growth, per se, is only weakly correlated with infant mortality. China has grown more rapidly than any other large country for decades now, but still has terrible infant mortality. Remember too, that it is per capita gdp that counts. Saudi Arabia inherited fabulous riches, but they mostly squandered it by concentrating it in a corrupt wealthy class and by quadrupling their population. Subequatorial Africa is less rich, but its lack of economic progress is as much due to population growth as to all its other calamities.