February 13, 2016
Much has been made in recent years about the alarming (and growing) economic chasm between the well-to-do and the less fortunate. It turns out that this isn’t merely a gap in material wealth, there’s a significant disparity in longevity as well.
This New York Times article notes that, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration, in the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half. By the year 2001, that gap had grown to 5.8 years.
And there’s more.
A recently-released report from economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.
While there are a number of factors at play here, there is one that is both obvious and over-arching. Smoking.
I have noticed this in my practice: as a general rule, the less a particular client is able to afford to smoke, the more likely it is that he or she will. Which makes one wonder whether the heavy taxes that are imposed on cigarettes (with which, by the way, I have no quarrel) are having the desired effect of reducing demand. Think about it: if you smoke a pack a day at $8 a pack, you are spending nearly $3,000 a year on cigarettes. If you are earning $15 an hour, that’s ten percent of your pay — before taxes. You’d think that would be a significant disincentive.
The Brookings Institute study calculates that smoking accounted for a third to a fifth of the gap in life expectancy between men with college degrees and men with only high school degrees. And for women it was as much as a quarter.
Two other important factors are obesity (though the gap in obesity rates between the rich and the poor has narrowed in the last 20 years) and the prescription drug epidemic, which has hit poor white America particularly hard.
According to Social Security Administration data, life expectancy for the wealthiest American men at age 60 was just below the rates in Iceland and Japan, two countries where people live the longest. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, however, ranked much further down — one notch above Poland and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, in Canada, the disparity in life expectancy between the rich and the poor has continued on a steady decline.
I’m not sure I know all the answers, but I sure know a problem when I see one.