No, says Andrew Leigh via Mark Thoma:
…not only are our coefficients close to zero,
but our standard errors are small enough that we can reject even modest
detrimental impacts of inequality on health. As one participant at the NBER
meetings … put it, “it’s not just zero, it’s very
zero”.
Leigh also says,
“Probably the best reason to worry about inequality is also the simplest:
a dollar brings more happiness to a poor person than a rich person.”
Which and whose dollar is he talking about?
…some are more zero than others.
Lower socioeconomic status (SES) confers heightened cardiovascular risk and mortality, although the mediating pathways are unclear.
Several papers explore the correlation between inequality and lower longevity. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/295/7/784?ijkey=52e06675926d0c5ff4aa52ac3c7b948764c7d9b4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
The key to understanding this may be finding underlying physiologic correlates. One factor that correlates with increased mortality was a decrease in the recovery normal pulse after exercise. It is common knowledge that this is a good estimate of cardiovascular fitness.
The above sited study showed that impaired functional capacity and abnormal heart rate recovery were strongly associated with lower socioeconomic status (SES) and accounted for a major proportion of the correlation between SES and mortality.
In addition to exercise, factors contributing to cardiovascular fitness include the absence of smoking and proper diet and weight control.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/296/7/763
Participation in a physically active lifestyle during mid-life appears to be critical to the maintenance of high physical function in those who are fit and well enough to work and do or do not report any long-standing illness.
If the above mechanisms help explain the increased mortality rate of low SES persons and a lifelong lack of exercise is the problem, it may be that too much access to labor saving devises such as powered vehicles, elevators, TV channel changers, etc and the lack of corresponding access to recreational forms of exercise or an aversion to exercise, may be a factor in lower life expectancy.
Leigh asks if inequality _kills_ you, not if it makes you sick. The relationship of poverty to poor health is long established (interestingly, more affirmation in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine). There may be a chicken/egg debate about whether poor people were sick first, but none about health disparities between classes.
I think this is an old chestnut – that people of lower SES die sooner than people of higher SES. The Japanese and the Swiss live longest, and as far as the Swiss are concerned, I think they eat very simple healthy local grown produce. Swiss women often say apologetically when offering a piece of apricot pie which every Hausfrau is baking just now in the fruit season “We have to support the farmers, don’t we?”.
Stress and and habits that kill: too much industrialised food off the assembly lines with all sorts of additives; smoking and d rinking to excess, drug abuse, too much medication and TOO little exercise. It doesn’t cost any money to walk briskly for at least 30 minutes a day.
Comments on this entry are closed.