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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
If you want to help X, help them because of the value of X, not because there exists some Y who is >>> X.
I agree with that.
However inequality in practice has been called the most important problem.
Here is a quote from wikipedia:
2013 Economics Nobel prize winner Robert J. Shiller said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem.[108] Increasing inequality harms economic growth.[109] High and persistent unemployment, in which inequality increases, has a negative effect on subsequent long-run economic growth. Unemployment can harm growth not only because it is a waste of resources, but also because it generates redistributive pressures and subsequent distortions, drives people to poverty, constrains liquidity limiting labor mobility, and erodes self-esteem promoting social dislocation, unrest and conflict. Policies aiming at controlling unemployment and in particular at reducing its inequality-associated effects support economic growth.[6]
The effects of inequality are massive and effect almost every facet of life. It would be hard to find a bigger problem than inequality.
The other part of my post was due to comments I have seen regularly that state that 'If someone doesn't have a job then I shouldn't have to give a penny to them. They can die because of evolution, they are unfit to live' type posts. Your post seemed like one of those because saying inequality is good is a prerequisite for such views and it may be a veiled attempt at excusing terrible conditions for the poor. Those comments may well not be aimed at your previous post, unless you are actually espousing those views. Not saying you are.
If anyone has any problems with a Wikipedia link, then I would like to remind them that the article has plenty of references which are a click away.