In The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, economists from Stanford, MIT and Harvard analyzed 1.4 million US tax records to see how income correlated with lifespan.
The researchers found that as the wealth gap has widened, so, too, has the mortality gap. Women in the top 1% of earners, for example, can expect to live 10 years longer than their counterparts in the poorest 1%. What’s more, this gap has got steadily bigger since wealth inequality began to spike in the USA, and continues to rise in correlation with wealth disparity.
“When we think about income inequality in the United States, we think that low-income Americans can’t afford to purchase the same homes, live in the same neighborhoods, and buy the same goods and services as higher-income Americans,” says Michael Stepner, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics. “But the fact that they can on average expect to have 10 or 15 fewer years of life really demonstrates the level of inequality we’ve had in the United States.”
The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014 [Raj Chetty, PhD; Michael Stepner, BA; Sarah Abraham, BA; Shelby Lin, MPhil; Benjamin Scuderi, BA; Nicholas Turner, PhD; Augustin Bergeron, MA; David Cutler/JAMA]
“Inequality linked to large, growing gap in lifespans: In unprecedented detail, lifespan gap shown to be large and growing rapidly [Science Daily]
The Death Gap
[Sam Pizzigati/Counterpunch]
The Death Gap
[Sam Pizzigati/Counterpunch] [Google Cache]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: Paupers’ graves, Stretford Cemetery, from the south
, Christine Johnstone, CC-BY-SA)