The paper titled Education, Knowledge, and the Evolution of Disparities in Health mainly talks about how scientific knowledge progresses will influence the evolution of disparities in health and its focus has been put on the 1964 Surgeon General Report on Smoking and Health. As a matter of fact, this report has been recognized as the first widely publicized report concerning the negative impacts that smoking can exert on health. In order for better illustration, this paper has as well applied a historical dataset that has included the smoking habits of pregnant women from 1959 to 1966, through which this paper finds that educated pregnant women tend to decrease their smoking when compared with those less educated women.
At the same time, the relative health of the newborns of those educated pregnant women will accordingly increase. Apart from that, stronger peer effects can be readily detected because educated women that are surrounded by other educated women are found to decrease smoking after the 1964 report when compared with those that are with less educated women. In the long run, the education gradient in both newborn health and smoking continued to rise, which reaches the peak in the 1980s and then shrinking, returning to the initial levels in the end. In this regard, it is not hard to find that these findings can help explain why disparities in health can increase in the short term in an era of medical knowledge advancements.
After looking through this paper, there is no doubt that the central argument of this paper is that scientific knowledge progresses can undoubtedly influence the evolution of disparities in health and it is necessary for the wide public to improve themselves so as to achieve progresses in scientific knowledge. In so doing, the audience can be guided to change their bad smoking habits in order for better health conditions. As a result, the health conditions of the wide public can be greatly improved in the end. There is no doubt that the argument proposed by the authors is absolutely clear and it has not been blurred by rhetoric.
It can be understood in this way that the authors have emphasized on the central argument throughout the article, which can guarantee the clarity of the argument to a large extent. Maybe the audience may be blurred by the rhetoric use at a specific moment while their idea can again be clear as long as they can continue to read this paper. However, what is a pity to say is that the authors have not provided a background to the argument at all but instead the authors tend to directly relate to the study topic, which can be easily found from the first sentence of the paper that “We study how advances in scientific knowledge affect the evolution of disparities in health”.
Personally speaking, I agree with the argument made by the authors. I belong to the kind of people that would like to get myself rid of a series of bad habits so that I can make myself a better one some day. So you can have fair knowledge that I cannot agree more on the authors’ idea to motivate people to change their bad habits in order for their better health conditions. What matters more is that I don’t like smoking a lot, let alone pregnant women’s smoking. Obviously, pregnant women’s smoking will not only cause great harm to their own health conditions, but also great harm to the health of their children either before their birth or after they are born.
When it comes to the authors’ motivation to write this work, what is a must to mention is that the authors would like to propose a new point of view. To put it more specifically, this paper would like to explore how scientific knowledge progresses will influence the evolution of disparities in health, through which the authors mention that educated pregnant women tend to decrease their smoking when compared with those less educated women.
At the same time, the relative health of the newborns of those educated pregnant women will accordingly increase. Apart from that, educated women that are surrounded by other educated women are found to decrease smoking after the 1964 report when compared with those that are with less educated women. In this sense, it can be readily detected that the authors would like to improve the health conditions of the wide public as much as possible in the reality. Or maybe it can be put in another way that the motivation for the authors to write this work is that the authors would like to contribute their own bit to the health improvement of the wide public in the due time.
Furthermore, it is apparent that the authors have used appropriate and credible sources in order to support the argument. Detailed speaking, the authors have referred to a series of peer-reviewed articles from previous scholars in order to make this paper more convincing and persuasive for the audience so that the audience are more likely to trust this paper in the end. With the application of a series of articles from previous scholars provided as the evidence for this paper, it is obvious that this paper can turn out to be a authoritative one. Also, the data used in this paper increases the validity of this paper to great extent.
The more concrete condition is that the data used in the paper contains the data from NCPP (National Collaborative Perinatal Project), which was collected from a survey of 59,391 pregnant women that found their shelter at one of twelve urban Academic Medical Centers from 1959 to 1966. Besides, this paper as well uses data from NNS (National Natality Surveys) in 1969 and in 1980. In fact, both NCPP (National Collaborative Perinatal Project) and NNS (National Natality Surveys) are both credible sources for the audience and the wide public tend to believe in those two sources to a large extent.
In addition, this paper has used the empirical strategy and the model used is the OLS and the regression model. The identifying assumption proposed by this article is that scientific knowledge progresses will absolutely influence the health disparities evolution. During the empirical process of this paper, this paper has used several models, which can be seen as the instrument used within. In addition, the endogenous variables in this paper are mainly cognitive ability, income, peers, etc. At the same time, the outcome variables contain the evolution of health disparities and the scientific knowledge advances. In this regard, there is no doubt that this empirical strategy is credible because the authors have proposed enough credible evidence to support their empirical strategy. It is obvious that a series of concrete statistics have been provided in order to elaborate on whether the education level of those pregnant women will influence whether they will choose to smoke or not. Besides, various models have been applied in order to display the results, which enables it to be persuasive for the audience.
Last but not the least, the findings of this paper is generalized to a large extent. That is to say, the findings of this paper can be applied to other situations as well. For instance, the findings of this paper can as well be applied to the contexts of forbidding others to smoke, which calls for the joint efforts of the wide public in the due time. In addition, this paper can a