If you think that the difference between being in the top 1 percent and being a part of the rest of America comes in the form of yachts, fabulous vacations, and mansions then … well, yes. Yes it does. But it also comes with something infinitely more important.
… the gap in life spans between rich and poor widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century.
It’s easy to get fixated on the graphs that show the rich increasingly separating from the rest of America when it comes to income. Forget that. The richest among us are living lives that are not just qualitatively different, but quantitatively longer. We morlocks are stagnant in not just income, but lifespan, while the tippy-top of the eloi pyramid soars on in both dollars and years. For the short-lived poor, the number of years is often defined by geography as much as income.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
New York City and Los Angeles provide a boost of years, but living in other cities, like Detroit or Dallas, can result in a significantly shorter life. The areas with the most abbreviated lives aren’t always where you’d expect. Sure, people in the Santa Barbara area are near the top of the charts and, as you might expect, being on the West Coast in general is a Pretty Good Thing when it comes to living long. But Mitchell, South Dakota and Bozeman, Montana, are also good places to stretch out the years.
The worst results are from areas in Texas, including the region around Pecos, which has the lowest overall lifespan in the study. However, there are other little hotspots of awful scattered about, especially in the Southwest and Midwest. In particular, Terre Haute, Indiana, comes out as a deathtrap, where lifespans are four years shorter than nearby Chicago. Nevada also shows up as a place you don’t want to live if you want to, you know, live.
So why are some regions so much more conducive to living longer?
Life expectancy for the poor is lowest in a large swath that cuts through the middle of the country, and it appears in pockets in the rest of the country, in places like Nevada. David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist and an author of the paper, calls it the “drug overdose belt,” because the area matches in part a map of where the nation’s opioid epidemic is concentrated.
The new findings dovetail with a much-discussed paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton published last year. That research showed rising death rates among middle-age white Americans, especially those with low education. It also showed a sharp increase in drug and alcohol poisonings, suicides and accidents in the first years of this century. Research from the Brookings Institution published in February also found a growing gap in life span between the rich and the poor.
Overall, Nevada stands out in the West for it’s drug-shortened lifespans, but once you get past that outlier, the worst values all come in a swatch that runs from Ohio and Indiana down through Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and across into Kansas. In all these states being poor is punished pretty seriously … in years off your life.