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Showing posts from April, 2016

Social Insurance and Leveling Incomes Is Pretty Easy

There's a new study out about income and life expectancy, and unsurprisingly it finds that rich people live much longer than poor ones — 15 years for men, 10 years for women. There's a smooth relationship between more money and more life, particularly at the very bottom of the income ladder, where there's a collapse of several years: However, there are also apparently some geographic wrinkles here. Poor people do very badly in Nevada, West Texas, and Indiana, but much better on the west coast and Glenwood Springs. At the New York Times , Neil Irwin and Quoctrung Bui seize on locally-based policy as an interim step that would be much easier than fixing income inequality: But the fact that some places have increased the life span of their poorest residents suggests that improving public health doesn’t require first fixing the broader, multidecade problem of income inequality. Small-scale, local policies to help the poor adopt and maintain healthier habits may succeed