Some might have seen this when it came out a few years ago. But I always found this study fascinating, not just for what it shows, but for what the discussion around the findings missed, even though the data was staring them right in the face.

So basically, Harvard did a study examining the correlation between income and life expectancy. No surprise -rich people live longer, which anyone who is dealing with the stresses and dangers of struggling to make ends meet, already knows. What surprised the researchers is the extent to which money makes a difference.

But what they missed were things that are even more interesting and important:

  1. The gender gap in life expectancy all but disappears at the top, and life expectancy becomes almost* equal (and I think the "almost" part is an artifact in and of itself). Because, what happens at the top? Well, if you are a 1%-er, you are shielded from most of the dangers, stresses, and indignities of the daily grind. You don't have to make health care decisions based on money, you live in safer neighborhoods, you have access to healthy food, much less likely to be a victim of crime, your sons aren't used as cannon fodder for wars, the fear of your world crashing down because you can lose your job is not wearing you down, etc. This goes generally* for both male and female 1%-ers, so we see that when men and women are both pretty equally -and well -cared for, men no longer live shorter lives than women.

  2. Conversely, at the bottom of the income scale, all of the social ills of being poor (disease, addiction, poor food, crime, etc.), seem to disproportionately accrue to men. Women are affected, but it seems like society has more of a safety net to prevent the bottom from completely falling out under women. So the life expectancy gap widens dramatically at the bottom.

  3. And of course these aspects were never discussed by the media. Liberals care that being poor makes people die, but don't even notice that it's men who are dying much earlier because of it. It's seen as just a natural fact of life that men are supposed to die younger. But, as we see at the top of the scale, this is not at all the case. In fact, the gap is virtually entirely due to how differently we treat men and women.

*I actually suspect that even the small gap that remains, is due to residual differentials not in biology, but in how society treats men vs. women. Why? Because what's the only thing better than being a 1%er man? Well, a 1%er woman! Because as a 1%er man, for the most part, you are still dealing with the stresses of attaining that position (unless you're just born into it) and remaining there. You have organizations to run, laws to navigate, competitors who want to take you down, and you very likely had to claw your way up there in the first place and may not have achieved that status until later in life, when getting there already took some toll on your health -through some combination of work, luck, conniving, and theft. And if you somehow get caught doing something improper, you have to pay the consequences (sometimes). The wife goes scot free. A 1%er woman who marries into it, doesn't have to deal with any of even that. If she has a career, which she often does, it's for her own pleasure -a fun hobby, basically. Nothing is riding on it. And... as she is usually younger, she achieved her 1%er status earlier in life than the man. Obviously there are women who got there in ways that didn't involve marriage or being born into it, but those are relatively few.

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