Brookings economist Barry Bosworth crunches the data on income and lifespans for the Wall Street Journal, and the numbers tell three clear stories.
1. Rich people live longer.
2. Richer people's lifespans are growing at a faster rate.
3. The problem is worse for women than for men.
First, let's look at the guys. A rich man (top decile) born in 1940 can expect to live 10 years longer after he turns 55 than a poor man (bottom decile). That longevity gap grew by four years in one generation.
Women live longer than men, overall. But their inequality gap getting worse. A rich woman at 55 can expect to live a decade longer than a poor woman, too. But this gap grew even more between the Silent and early Boomer generations, by six years.
Here's the money chart and it tells a really sad story. In the richest country in the world, the expected lifespan of middle- and lower-income women is actually declining. At every income level, more money means more life.
A few thoughts and implications:
1. Causality: This is your obligatory correlation-is-not-causation caveat. It's intuitive that being rich gives you access to better food, more social connectivity, and higher-quality health care. But this data does not prove that making another $10,000 literally buys you additional months of life. Confounding variables abound. For example, poor people are more likely to be smokers, and smoking kills you faster, no matter what AGI you fill in on your tax forms. Poorer parts of the country smoke more than richer parts of the country, for a variety of cultural and tax reasons.
2. Geography: Annie Lowrey reported that sorting of zip codes into rich and poor means you can have two counties divided by 300 miles and more than 20 years of expected life. The typical guy in McDowell County, West Virginia, makes less than $30,000 a year and doesn't live to 65. Five hours north on the highway, a typical man living in Fairfax County, Virginia, makes more than $100,000 and lives more than 80 years. The two Virginian counties are two different countries.
3. Policy: When somebody in Washington proposes raising the retirement age for Social Security or Medicare, he typically says "We are living longer." The We in that sentence applies to an audience of white rich old men and women who typically represent the country in the Washington. But it doesn't apply to the millions of women whose lifespans are actually declining. Raising the Social Security retirement age disproportionately reduces lifetime benefits for the very people Social Security was invented to protect.