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Life Expectancy Study: It's Not Just What You Make, It's Where You Live (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report on NPR.org: Poor people who reside in expensive, well-educated cities such as San Francisco tend to live longer than low-income people in less affluent places, according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records. The study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, bolsters what was already well-known -- the poor tend to have shorter lifespans than those with more money. But it also says that among low-income people, big disparities exist in life expectancy from place to place, said Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University. "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," Chetty said, in an interview with NPR.The New York Times' take on the same study: New York is a city with some of the worst income inequality in the country. But when it comes to inequality of life spans, it's one of the best. Impoverished New Yorkers tend to live far longer than their counterparts in other American cities, according to a detailed new research of Social Security and earnings records published Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They still die sooner than their richer neighbors, but the city's life-expectancy gap was smaller in 2014 than nearly everywhere else, and it has shrunk since 2001 even as gaps grew nationwide. That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country's most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves.
Wealth pays for good health care system with good hospitals and trained physicians. Also more hospitals are located in the well doing areas. If the poor walks in to the ER, first they have the ability to reach the hospital on foot, and second they also benefit from the same higher quality materials and equipment, and not the least from the experience of the doctors, which is going to be not surprisingly better. So they do have a better chance of receiving good quality health care that is set up for the wealthy people, and they have much better change of actually reaching that healthcare than in the middle of nowhere town, where the closes hospital is the large animal vet in the next town 10 miles over. Also, the article speaks about poor people. Not those that are homeless, not those that are in poverty. Just poor people, and in New York or San Fran you are poor making 40 - 50k annually, which is actually not bad compared to the below the poverty line homeless living on the corner.
There's absolutely no mention of "moral evil" in either articles. It's simply an observation that can help us determine why that is and to try to keep the public healthy. There's no, "Income inequality causes different health outcomes, QED communism"
Allow me to summarize their findings. Poor people are more likely to be obese and obese people have a shorter life expectancy*.
*Except in dense urban areas where walking and public transit are more common than driving and parking.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
RTFA. No such thing as "moral evil". It's still a valid and interesting scientific subject.
When there is no public transit, the threshold is a few hundred dollars. One fender bender, one blown tire or busted alternator is all it takes for a poor person without public transit to fall off. Can't get to work, can't earn the money needed to fix the car. They would depend on the kindness and help from near and dear to get past that kind of emergency.
Most poor people would rather have a dependable transportation system to their work place and affordable child care than dole. Poverty rates can be halved just by providing/subsidizing transportation and child care.
Urban area unemployment rate is over 33% approaches even 50%. That means even in those blighted areas 50 to 66% of the people actually go to work. Somehow, despite all the hardships, despite seeing the drug dealers and pimps rolling in dough, people line up to work for minimum wage in a burger joint. Shows how much poverty could be alleviated if we make it possible for them to work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nice rant for mod points, but that's where the niceties end.
Free people aren't equal. Equal people aren't free.
I have no clue what planet or country you live in, but here in the USofA we are not free. You can't own a house and land, you pay rent to the Government and a Bank. You can't own a business, in fact good luck with all the regulations and paperwork required even if you are doing 1 person contracting. Work in the city? Well, some rich person is going to make sure that the majority of your income goes to them in rent. Don't like it, don't live in the city and spend 4 hours a day commuting. And even if you "buy" a house in the sticks you are only rending the land from the Government. Have doubts, refuse to make your tax payments and call me so I can laugh at you. You sure as hell can't buy land in the city, because property value is intentionally over inflated to keep people like you and me out. You can't drive the car you bought until you pay the State annual fees to drive, and depending on where you live pay for the proper testing on your car, and pay for the right amount of insurance, and of course you can only drive as fast as the Government tells you you can drive.
You are not free to work, free to eat what you want, free to hunt, and you are no longer free to practice your religion.
I emphatically state that it IS a moral evil to have people like Gates and the Koch brothers with billions and billions of dollars, who use their money as bribery to influence the system to further enrich themselves. Meanwhile we have people that can't afford basic clothing and food, and mentally ill people on the streets with no support system what so ever.
We have no equality because people like you not only ignore the morality of certain people who abuse the system, but attempt to claim that does not happen or have influence if it does.
See Socrates the story of the Artisan. Nothing new here except the people who spout the same tired bullshit. .
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Let me highlight one in the second TFA's excerpt:
Words like "best" / "worst" are a moral evaluation. They could have used "highest", "lowest" instead, if they didn't want to drag normative morality into it.
To the NYT's credit, the punchline of their story backs away from inequality as the evil:
Egads, is that what you think? The popularly quoted government statistic for unemployment rate only considers people who (claim they) are actively looking for a job.
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There is a very simple answer to a large skew in New York's favor.
"according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records"
"That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country's most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves."
That wouldn't get most of the poor in NYC. The poor who fail in that struggle neither pay social security nor taxes.
Preempting my *waiting* because your last paragraph is grating. It simply states exactly what I said was the problem. In your general view, unequal is good. You said it twice, so you must believe it to be true. It is completely unfair, so is unfair also good? Should we codify this unfairness so that certain people always have everything they want and never need to work, and other people perpetually work for no gain?
The summary of Socrates's story of the Artisan is this: When the artisan makes a masterpiece in the Republic should he be allowed to be showered in coins so that he should never want or need again? Socrates argues that the Republic needs to protect against this, because the person will become a detriment to the Republic. Not only does it ensure that they never need to be productive in their craft again, but it will provide the means for them to meddle in the affairs of everyone around them.
We see exactly the latter when we find out how much money certain political figures make for attending a dinner and giving a short speech. Sorry, but there is nothing a politician can say in an hour worth $250,000,000.00 US. If they were giving out cures for cancers in that hour, sure. There is nothing legal that people can get by paying these extraordinary "speaking fees". This is exactly what Socrates discussed in action, and the fact that it is not strictly illegal does not make it morally good. In fact, it does the exact opposite.
The fact that you ignore the dialogue and go right to "unequal is good" demonstrates that you are immorally defunct yourself. It could be caused by ignorance and be curable, but could also be the behavior of a sociopath.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Once again proving income inequality is a purely political problem. It shouldn't come as a big surprise you'd much rather be poor in NYC, with its relatively robust safety net paid by wealthy people, than in some rural Appalachian town where everybody around you was also poor.
Yes, "worst fuel economy" strongly implies something beyond "lowest mileage".
True. "Worst" is a charged word with an implicit normative value judgment.
"lowest" is a word of measurement that denotes being at one end of a measurement. There is not necessarily normative judgment implicit in it, although people may hear a normative judgment in it depending on what it is measuring.
If I note you are the child with the worst height, I am being cruel; if I note you are the child who is shortest, I am being factual.