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Life Expectancy Study Hints It’s Not Just Your Income, But Where You Live That Matters — The Poor In Rich Locality Live Longer?

By Alap Naik Desai
Published on: 03:46 PST, Apr 11, 2016

The recently conducted life expectancy study indicated it isn’t just the income, but the place where you stay that has a major impact on your longevity. While poor people do have relatively shorter lifespans as compared those who are affluent, the people with low income could benefit from staying in rich localities and boost their chances of surviving longer, indicated a study that analyzed more than a billion Social Security records and tax history.

It is an undeniable fact that life expectancy between those with high earnings and those with meager wages is quite different. In fact, the life expectancy gap between low and high U.S. wage earners has been steadily widening in recent decades. It is a known fact that there’s a strong correlation between income and life expectancy in the United States. In fact, a recent study indicates the life expectancy of the America’s poorest residents in counties like Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, and Hernando, life expectancy dropped by more than 2 years between 2001 and 2014.

To draw their conclusions, the group of researchers collected more than 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. The group intended to measure the relationship between income and life expectancy. However, multiple other findings surfaced that throw in a few other variables other than income, which affects the lifespan of Americans.

The study, published in Journal of the American Medical Association, indicates that life expectancy depends on the personal income. In fact, after analyzing more than a billion death and income tax records between 2000 and 2014, researchers concluded that after 40, your income becomes a critical indicator of your expected longevity. As expected, life expectancy at the age of 40 and above is higher for people with higher incomes.

However, it is astonishing just how long affluent people are expected to live, as compared those who hail from the poorer sections of the society. In other words, the gap between longevity between the poor and the rich is quite wide, noted, Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University and lead author of the study,

“There are vast gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans. To give you a sense of the magnitude, men in the bottom 1 percent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan.”

According to the Tampa Bay Times, people with the top 1 percent of incomes could expect to live 14.6 years longer than those in the bottom 1 percent. Speaking about the same, noted Princeton economist Angus Deaton wrote the following in an accompanying editorial,

“It is as if the top income percentiles belong to one world of elite, wealthy U.S. adults, whereas the bottom income percentiles each belong to separate worlds of poverty, each unhappy and unhealthy in its own way.”

Interestingly, while the income does decide your life expectancy, the locality in which you reside also decides how long you will live. The study indicates that even among the poor or low-income groups, wide variation is observed when the region or neighborhood changes, reported NPR. Speaking about the disparity, Chetty added the following.

“The story really varies greatly across areas within America. There are some places where the poor are doing quite well, gaining just as much in terms of life span as the rich, 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.”

Asked why the poor in the affluent neighborhoods have better life expectancy despite having low incomes, the authors lamented they didn’t have a concrete answer. The study only indicates that the relationship between life expectancy and income isn’t as strong as previously imagined and other aspects at the regional level can affect the longevity.

The researchers did suggest that affluent localities do stress upon healthier lifestyles by banning harmful practices like smoking in public places, which the poor follow and benefit.

[Photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images]

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