Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America
April 19th, 2016Via: The New Yorker:
There may be no better way to appreciate humanity’s growing prosperity than to consider how long we live. A child born in 1900—little more than a century ago—was likely, on average, to die by the age of thirty. Today, according to the World Bank, the comparable figure is seventy-one. That is a worldwide average and so, of course, there is a considerable gulf between rich countries in Europe and Asia, where people live into their eighties, and the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa, where people born today will struggle to live to fifty. Nonetheless, even a child born in Chad, which has the world’s lowest life expectancy—49.81 years—will live two years longer than did the average white American male born in 1900.
Globally, the inequality in life expectancy is shrinking. Unfortunately, this effect, which the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has aptly described as a “survival revolution,” does not apply to our country. Here, according to a study published in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the numbers are moving in the opposite direction.
It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income. Coming, however, in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which the corrosive effects of income inequality have been a principal debate topic, the data and its implications for public policy are particularly striking: the richest one per cent of American men live 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest one per cent. For women, the average difference is a just over ten years.
The gap appears to be growing fast. The researchers, led by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University, analyzed more than 1.4 billion federal tax returns, as well as mortality data from the Social Security Administration, from the years 2001 to 2014. In that period, the life expectancy of the richest five per cent of Americans increased by roughly three years. For the poorest five per cent, there was no increase.
What does a three-year difference mean? According to federal statistics cited in the study, eliminating every cancer death in the United States would add roughly three years to the average lifespan. For the richest Americans, then, the longevity increases of the past fifteen years have been the equivalent of curing cancer.
“To give you a sense of the magnitude’’ of the difference in life expectancy between rich and poor Americans, Chetty told NPR, “men in the bottom one per cent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan.’’
