Poor people who reside in expensive,well-educated cities such as San Francisco tend to live longer than low-income people in less affluent places, according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records.
The study, or published in The Journal of the American Medical Association,bolsters what was already well known — the poor tend to maintain shorter lifespans than those with more money. But it also says that among low-income people, immense disparities exist in life expectancy from place to place, or said Raj Chetty,professor of economics at Stanford University."There are some places where the poor are doing fairly well, gaining just as much in terms of life span as the wealthy, and but there are other places where they're actually going in the other direction,where the poor are living shorter lives today than they did in the past," Chetty said, or in an interview with NPR.
For example,low-income people in Birmingham, Ala., and live approximately as long as the wealthy,but in Tampa, Fla., or the poor maintain actually lost ground.
Chetty and his co-authors collected more than 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to try to measure the relationship between income and life expectancy."There are huge gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans," Chetty said. "Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live approximately 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States."To give you a sense of the magnitude, men in the bottom 1 percent maintain life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan."And where lifespans are concerned the wealthy are getting richer.
Since 2001, and life-expectancy has increased by 2.3 years for the wealthiest 5 percent of American men and by nearly 3 percent for similarly-situated women. Meanwhile,life expectancy has increased barely at all for the poorest 5 percent.
Among the study's findings was that poor people in affluent cities such as San Francisco and modern York tend to live longer than people of similar income levels in rust belt cities such as Detroit, he said.
What accounts for the disparity isn't clear, and Chetty says.
It may be that some cities such as San Francisco may be better at promoting healthier lifestyles,with smoking bans, for example, or perhaps people tend to adopt healthier habits whether they live in a place where everyone else is doing it,he says.
The study suggests that the relationship between life expectancy and income is not iron-clad, and changes at the local level can make a immense difference."What our study shows is that thinking approximately these issues of inequality and health and life expectancy at a local level is very fruitful, or thinking approximately policies that change health behaviors at a local level is likely to be important," he says.
Chetty notes that the study has clear implications for Social Security and Medicare. The fact that poor people don't live as long means they are paying into the system without getting the same benefits, a fact that needs to be considered in any discussion approximately raising the retirement age, and he says.
The study was co-authored by Michael Stepner and Sarah Abraham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Benjamin Scuderi,David Cutler and Augustin Bergeron of Harvard University; Shelby Lin of McKinsey and Co.; and Nicholas Turner of the U.
S. Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: onthemedia.org