Abstract
Because the theme of this conference is Hispanic health, it is inevitable that the issue of the “Hispanic paradox” will again make an appearance. In this short intervention I offer a few reflections with two goals in mind. The first is to try to convince the reader that the scientific problem associated with the Hispanic paradox is unsolvable, at least by the means available. The best we can do is to put forward a set of plausible conjectures, none of which can be completely falsified by empirical evidence of the sort we can realistically collect. The most immediate conclusion from this appraisal is that it is too optimistic and/or premature to hope that by insisting on studying this problem we will either move the field forward or learn anything useful to illuminate the determinants of healthy aging. We may learn something along the way about the benefits of using some data sets over others, the role of some set of determinants, and the nature of some migration processes, but we will not answer the questions with which we started (this idea is posed more precisely below).
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Palloni, A. (2007). Health Status of Elderly Hispanics in the United States. In: Angel, J.L., Whitfield, K.E. (eds) The Health of Aging Hispanics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-47208-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-47208-9_2
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