A new study led by Raj Chetty suggests geographic location plays an outsized role in life expectancy for lower earners
A blanket of fog covers the San
Francisco skyline in a view from the Berkeley hills Sunday, Feb. 28,
2016, in San Francisco.(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Across the U.S., the gap between expected longevity of rich and poor is widening, according to the study led by Stanford Universityeconomist Raj Chetty.
The findings are stark: Life expectancy differed by 15 years for men and 10 years for women between the top 1% and bottom 1% of income distribution. The study examined 1.4 billion records of income-tax files for people aged 40 to 76 years from 1999 through 2014, data that include age, gender and geographic location.
For a 40-year-old man in the bottom income percentile in the U.S., average life expectancy is on par with peers in Pakistan and Sudan. By contrast, a 40-year old man in the top 1% of American income distribution has higher life expectancy than men anywhere on the planet.
“Conditional on reaching 40 years of age, individuals in the top 1% of income have 10 to 15 more years to enjoy their richly funded lives and to spend time with their children and grandchildren, and they are pulling away from everyone else,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel-winning economist at Princeton University who is an expert in inequality and poverty.
Mr. Deaton wrote an editorial accompanying the study by Mr. Chetty and others, but he wasn’t a co-author on the study. Mr. Deaton and fellow Princeton professor Anne Case‘s research last year found that suicide, alcohol abuse, drug overdoses and chronic liver diseases drove a rise in the death rate of middle-aged whites between 1999 and 2013.
The Chetty-led paper also found that longevity inequality got worse, not better, in recent years. The study found that between 2001 and 2014, individuals in the top 5% of income distribution saw their life expectancy increase by around three years, whereas individuals in the bottom 5% experienced no gains.
The study also found that location matters for low earners. Low-income individuals tend to live more healthily and for longer in cities with college-educated populations, high incomes, more immigrants, and high levels of government expenditures, such as New York and San Francisco.
Being rich anywhere broadly correlates with enjoying good health anywhere, but location is a key factor in health for people in lower income groups. For people in the bottom income quartile, places with the highest life expectancies were mostly in California, whereas the lowest life expectancies were clustered in the industrial Midwest. The authors noted those places tend to have higher rates of smoking and obesity, and lower rates of exercise.
Michael Stepner, one of the study’s co-authors, said economic decline and shrinking populations in the Rust Belt aren’t necessarily to blame. Far more important appear to be initiatives at the local level, potentially because cities with high costs of living and highly educated populations are often the first to enact public-health policies such as smoking bans, restrictions on trans fats or taxes on sugary drinks.
The study found measures of health-insurance coverage and health spending were of lesser importance than social and economic factors in determining health for low-income individuals. Nor did having health insurance seem to be a factor in increasing life expectancy for poorer groups.
“The key driver of differences in inequality across areas of life expectancy is probably not access to health care,” Mr. Chetty said.
Where the Rich Live the Longest
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