8.3 Mortality Risk Ratio!
Julian Cristia in the Journal of Health Economics:
Using a unique data set matching administrative and survey data, this study explores trends in [U.S. mortality] differentials by lifetime earnings for the 1983 to 2003 period. … There are large differentials … in different quintiles … Controlling for race, Hispanic origin, marital status, and education only slightly reduces these differentials. … Differentials decrease markedly with age. … In the period 1983 to 1997, men ages 35 to 49 in the bottom lifetime earnings quintile had mortality 5.9 (1.8 for women) times higher than those in the top quintile; in the period 1998 to 2003 this ratio increased to 8.3 (4.8 for women).
8.3!! For a mortality risk ratio, 8.3 is HUGE. For ages 50-64, that number drops to 4.8, which is still huge. Wow. Income, or something correlated, sure is important for health.
I wrote,
mortality rate for people aged 15-24 across the US in the same time period was around 9 per 10,000 during the same time period (averaging 150 for the males plus 30 for the females)That should be 15 and 3. The figures on that page are given per 100,000, and I copied without dividing by 10.
Agree with some commenters, causality in the opposite direction may be more important.
However:
From http://www.baltimorehealth...., we see that in Sandtown, a community near me with an economy based mainly on crack that is one of the most crime-ridden areas in the nation, the mortality rate for people aged 15-24 was 30 per 10,000 in 2002-2006.
From http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/dat..., we see the mortality rate for people aged 15-24 across the US in the same time period was around 9 per 10,000 during the same time period (averaging 150 for the males plus 30 for the females)
That gives us a risk factor increase of 3.33 from the bottom income to the average, which is over half our risk factor of 8.3 (because you multiply, not add, them; we only need another risk factor of 2.5 decrease going from the average to the top quintile to get to 8.3).
If you look on the next page of the Sandtown report, you see that homicide accounts for 7.4 deaths per 10,000 people. The fact that it has a percentage (years life lost / deaths) ratio > 3 indicates that almost all of these deaths are among the young. Also note that deaths from AIDS and drug overdoses are concentrated among the young, though not as heavily.
The rate of death, disease, and crime in our inner cities is mind-blowing to people who don't live there. For example, 5% of people in DC have HIV. Remember that approximately 0% of people not in the "inner city" have HIV. There are areas where most people don't have jobs, most people have STDs, AIDS is common, and most men will go to prison at some point in their life.