The thing about Americans is that even if you got them to look at the data, they would start bellowing about "personal responsibility" and how the women whose babies die probably bring it upon themselves.
Americans aren't interested in saving lives or making things better; they're interested in PUNISHMENT.
And having someone to sneer at.
Which I think is caused by being descended from pack-based primates.
I think it's a lot more complex than that, because if you look at Sapolsky's work with baboons (and he's where all our ideas about primate social experience comes from) he found that in one group where all the dominant assholes died off from an infection that took a much heavier toll on dominant assholes (no kidding), the culture of that troupe changed to a much gentler, less stressful culture, and remains changed over 20 years later, not due to genetic factors (else the assholes young would have simply grown up to be assholes, and the new assholes that joined the troupe would have remained assholes) but due purely to social factors; the power of the meme, as it were.
I think that we make a very typical human mistake when we look around and assume that because our culture has dominated, it reflects the biologically inevitable nature of human beings. It's called "false consensus" and is also the reason why when someone makes a racist joke and nobody speaks up, they assume that it's because everyone else is racist too.
The problem with aggressively dominating expansionist/colonial societies is that, because of their nature, they DO spread and they DO take over other, less aggressive societies. That doesn't mean it's basic human nature to do so, just that it's the nature of that KIND of society.
The question is whether there's a way of neutralizing them.
