Why Is Infant Mortality in the United States So Comparatively High? Some Possible Answers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The infant mortality rate (IMR) is the rate of death of children younger than one year of age. In the United States, the IMR has been declining over time. However, it has been declining much more slowly than in other nations. As a result, the US global ranking in IMRs is also declining. This analytic essay explores some of the reasons why it might be undergoing this relative decline by critically dissecting secondary sources of data. We found that slow progress in reducing IMR over the past decade is partly due to lower birth rates among immigrants, who tend to have healthier babies than native-born mothers. However, this does not explain longer-term trends, which reveal a relative decline in the well-being of women of reproductive age. We speculate that longer-term declines are partially due to a deemphasis on government health and antipoverty programs. This deemphasis results not only in weaker socioeconomic support but also in rising medical costs, which are consuming an increasingly larger share of Americans' declining disposable income.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".