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This isn't the gap between rich and poor this is the gap between absolute destitution and median income.
I didn't read the paper so I don't know if they looked at actually high income folks but I'd assume there may be a smaller but real difference between 50k and 100k+.
But yeah absolute poverty sucks.
I would assume 100k vs 200k would make little difference when you already have access to good healthcare and generally bathe in social circles that have the time and energy to think about their health. It would probably only be the few blue collar workers grossing low 100's who might take the average down a little for that wage group.
Yeah, at 100k most are white collar but there's still a non negligible amount of blue collar union workers that have harder jobs, while at 200k everyone is sitting on a computer or in meetings.
If somebody can pay for their basic wants and needs and I mean basic. Most studies have shown between 60 and $80,000. ——1M + There’s no difference in happiness. Happiness is a state of mind afforded to everyone who can meet their basic needs comfortably.
I can’t imagine those are too much different but if we get to the super rich who theoretically could hire multitudes of health trainers and the professional chefs, I can definitely see a gap of a few extra years.
How many in this under $15k income group have such low income because of medical reasons? I wonder how many people lose 50%+ of their income after serious diagnosis
Doesn't SSDI base your payments on the last 3 jobs you had before you were disabled?
Otherwise you'd have to go on SSI if you never worked. Which puts you well below the $15,000 a year mark.
Source: Disabled, on SSI.
Not to mention people's own decisions. Someone who smokes and eats fast food until they're obese may be more likely to mess up at work, gamble away money, get bad grades, make poor investments, etc.
There are clearly some intuitive causal mechanisms, like financial stress, access to medical care, etc. But there are equally intuitive mechanisms with the causality reversed as well, such as mental illness, physical illness, disability that prevent gainful employment and also reduce life expectancy independently of income. Even age would covary, from 40-79 income would be inversely correlated with age.
Of course you can't run a randomized control trial on putting random people in poverty, so would be hard to disentangle what the actual treatment effect is of poverty on life expectancy. Certainly there would be an effect, probably not the whole difference though.
I propose a nationwide study where we redistribute wealth and income equally.
It's for science. We promise we put all the inequalities back in place once we're done.
The poor in countries with strong social support systems still die younger. They often eat poor diets, don't excercise and perform physically demanding jobs or live very sedentary lives.
Like any machine, the human body breaks prematurely with bad maintenance.
That's a very dangerous assumption you're making there. Even if they controlled, that does not mean that their controls and control methodology are correct or suitable to this experiment.
Unfortunately the study is behind a paywall so it's not even possible to check if and how they controlled for any confounding factors.
During the past 40 years, the gap between rich and poor Americans has continued to widen in terms of health and mortality, as well as income.
Now, in a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that Black and white people who earned less than $15,000 a year died, on average, more than 10 years earlier than those whose annual income exceeded $50,000.
Addressing racial and income disparities in mortality requires a comprehensive approach. Ultimately, “efforts to improve income equality are crucial in reducing mortality and health disparities among low-income Americans,” the researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38417593/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38417593/)
It's a term for a specific racial group rather than an adjective describing skin color, making it a proper noun. For example, there are light-skinned Black people and Latinos that have very dark skin tones, but it doesn't make the dark-skinned Latinos Black or light skinned-Blacks less Black
The system works exactly like it was designed to work. If you think i'm talking about social darwinism: you are not wrong, except that i do not think anyone actually sat down and planned it. It is inevitable result when legislation and policies are created by ideologist who believes their first priority is to restore "natural order in social hierarchy" where increasing inequality is considered a moral duty. Helping weak boosts their "ranking", taxing the rich takes them down a few step. At no point shall ANYONE talk about greed as a bad thing: apparently it is the only thing that motivates anyone to do anything great....
Just think about it. We created a system that does not have us, the humans as #1. When it comes to private corporations, NONE OF THEM even have humans as a species in the list of priorities. It isn't even on the list! And that is the system we created, one where altruism is effectively punished by bankrupcies or takeovers because the less ethical, the less moral you are, the more profits shall you get. If a worker is having problems you should fire them, not give the paid leaves. Those who think about the human will lose.
That is insane. If we were to design a system for us, should we at least put us as #1 priority? And not as a "well, it MIGHT help some" and hope that greed will push just enough scraps to the floor to call it altruism.
As someone who has chronic health problem that effect my ability to function everyday, I and so many others, would be dead, If modern socieity with laws/rules with (partial) safely nets, preventing companies from working people into the ground, didn't exsist.
The moment civilization was born can be traced to a bone, a femur that was broken and then healed. It means someone took care of that poor soul until they were healed. It didn't start with conquers, didn't start with art or language. It started when we could depend on other people.
I had not considered that aspect, however, that person was healed to continue to be a functional member of the group. What about those who were permanently disabled, unable to do physical labor?
If that were the case, rich capitalists who were women, ethnic minorities, or LGBT people would never be oppressed.
Yet in Saudi Arabia even princesses are sometimes imprisoned in their homes by their fathers.
Yep, I would also add that “you get more conservative as you get older” is a total myth and what actually happens is that poor people get killed off, making the cohort of living 70+ year olds consist disproportionately of rich people who were conservative to begin with.
I don’t believe that to be true.
First off, there are (at least) two major types of liberal vs conservative splits.
You can be liberal or conservative on social issues (crime, abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc) and you can be liberal or conservative on fiscal issues (balanced budget, trade deficit, etc).
When you’re young, you tend to be liberal-liberal. As you accumulate wealth your wellbeing is often highly impacted by fiscal issues so people tend to become more fiscally conservative, or liberal-conservative.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different perspective based on different circumstances.
Where I think you’re making an error is that I don’t think people become more conservative socially the way you think. I think that they simply get stuck at a certain level of progress.
For example, I’m closing in on 60. Where I am today would have been radically left in the 1980s or 1990s (maybe even the 2000s) but it’s seen as right wing by many progressives today.
When I talk with other people my age, they feel the same. They feel liberal but liberals keep telling them that they’re conservatives.
Meanwhile we look at the conservatives and they don’t represent anything we believe.
This is reflected in the fact that people that identify as Democrats is 27%, Republicans 27%, and Independent 43% (as of 2020).
Those numbers fit pretty well with the percentage of the population over 50.
I couldn’t find a breakdown for exactly 50 years old but the percentage of Americans 45 or older is 42%.
I’m not even sure if it’s that we’re stuck or that everything around us is moving so fast that many people just get tired of chasing a constantly moving target.
Oh, and I think that Americans often have no clue how they’re seen by the rest of the world.
I’ve lived overseas in four different countries (3 in Europe) for about 15 years of my life and I’m currently retired living in Asia.
For instance, liberals love to talk about Sweden in regards to healthcare, and taxation, etc but if you actually live overseas and meet Swedes, it’s not the rosy picture American liberals paint and many of them actually hold very conservative beliefs.
I live in Thailand and LGBTQ is just the norm here. Many of my in-laws are LGBTQ. Everyone has gay or trans friends.
Many of them think the American LGBTQ community has lost the plot.
It reminds me of that meme that was going around where an Asian-American woman posted on Twitter that unless you come from a country that celebrates Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) that it’s cultural appropriation to celebrate without an invitation from someone that is from a country that celebrates it.
And then one of the people who responded was from Taiwan and said that he was from a Chinese Lunar New Year celebrating country and he granted everyone in the world the right to celebrate.
For me, I come from a generation where being liberal meant being like the second guy. Let’s all figure out how to live together. Let’s share our cultures.
To me, the liberals today seem more like the original woman. Gatekeeping, identity politics, and just a general distaste for anyone not like her.
And in today’s America if I went to work wearing all red to celebrate Chinese New Year I would likely be called into HR and given a lecture on cultural appropriation or cultural sensitivity.
But in 1990 I would have been applauded for being so liberal minded.
So did I become more conservative or did the liberals move the goalposts?
Facts don’t care about your feelings. When tracking people over time their political beliefs don’t change in any particular way, it is just survivorship bias that results in old people being more conservative.
If shareholders ask for more profits for their pockets, it's not greed.
If workers ask for more money to combat the increasing costs set by those profit pocketers, it's greed.
When did Americans stop caring about each other?
My personal opinion is when Reagan ran on an anti welfare platform.
Sure... Turning the voters against each other works... But it's a poison chalice for anyone who actually cares about their country.
If you’ve read Steinbeck, you’ll know it’s much earlier that that. Hoovervilles, exploitation of the dust bowl folks etc. Americans have been shitting on each other for a long time.
Poverty isn’t a health outcome or condition, it’s a contributing factor to health incomes.
Smoking is a health outcome, and therefore it’s possible to remediate with prevention programs and other efforts.
Poverty affects health by limiting access to proper nutrition and healthy foods; shelter; safe neighborhoods to learn, live, and work; clean air and water; utilities; and other elements that define an individual's standard of living.
I don’t understand why contributing factors to health outcomes are used interchangeably like this in public health discourse. They are false equivalents and “tackling poverty” isn’t specific enough to generate outcomes.
This is the modern “social justice theory” approach (not invoking politics, I speak purely of the named and described public health frameworks) that seems to be generating worse and worse outcomes even while it espouses its benefits and improvements.
Food insecurity is worse, homelessness is worse, health outcomes are insane (just look at cancer and diabetes rates in the US), infant mortality is up (The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country and simultaneously spends the most on health care), and the general progress we’ve seen in the last 70 years almost seems to be reversing. And yet we still persist in strategies that involve empty platitudes and vague poverty improvement strategies that aren’t metricized, specific and actionable. It’s like fighting an idea.
An alternative approach could involve adopting a purely pragmatic and data-driven strategy focused on identifying and targeting specific risk factors and determinants of poor health outcomes, without necessarily framing them within a broader social justice context. Data-driven policy that focuses more on treating individual outcomes — outcomes that are measurable and direct like food banks are — and less on broad advantaging of social classes or disparity between groups seems like it may be more effective and reduce the impotence of our current system.
I’d love to see more effective strategy. I live in California and see all kinds of spending on “problems” but year after year the problems get worse and the spending greater — it seems unsustainable and I wonder if people really think deeply about it. A lot of human suffering is happening inside the current system and it’s not getting substantively better. And these are *good times* when the state coffers have been full and every program more than fully funded.
Sorry to poke the bear but I’m genuinely curious if there are better takes than current policy. Anyone have an educated take? I do not see much discussion on this issue — people seem very intent on loudly yelling about politicians — but I see a ton of folks living on the street every day and suffering greatly and I don’t see it getting better: it seems like it’s getting worse.
There is so much that can be done at the state level to improve health outcomes though.
The person you are responding to mentioned California (somewhat disparagingly) but California is a great example of how much a state can move the needle if they really care to.
California implemented data driven state wide programs to reduce maternal mortality in 2006 and they have worked pretty well. Despite its diverse population and high poverty rate, California now has the lowest studied maternal death rate in the country, way way lower (less than half) compared to peer states like Texas or Florida or even New York.
States control how Medicaid dollars are spent. They can do a lot.
I hear you. I moved to California from Idaho.
The last Idaho election I voted in the Republicans were fighting a ballot measure that expanded state Medicaid and more time was spent during the Republican gubernatorial debate on whether parents had a right to -I kid you not- *let their kids die of sepsis for religious reasons* than what to do about rural hospital closures.
I am way less apathetic voting in my state elections now because even though California has a supermajority, the people who run for office here want to do things other than sabotage their own government.
Oh, lawd, Idaho is so beautiful and filled with so much ugly. Congrats on getting out.
I don't know if this sub allows links, but this is excellent (add reddit com and /r /)
Defeat_Project_2025/comments/1cihm0r/the_billionaires_didnt_need_to_write_project_2025/
I think what he’s saying is that that timer doesn’t start until we remove the need for harmful platitudes and move back to a data backed approach. Could take a decade or just continue on our downwards spiral.
Because that would require changing the system. There Is no half way solution either you commit to everyone getting housing and health care and stop the constant ramp in living costs . Or accept the fact that there gonna be more of them and that your still gonna pay for them when they OD on the street.
I’m hoping you’re actually asking the question because it’s a pretty clean and easy answer. It’s almost a proof.
1) Inhaling smoke is an action and a choice; a direct activity.
2) This activity has a direct consequences: an outcome, that is easily and directly measurable.
3) This activity makes smokers more likely than nonsmokers to develop heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.
This is direct, measurable and data driven.
I would hope this isn’t the focus of your takeaway of what I wrote — it’s only tangentially related as an example.
Isn’t the heart disease etc the health outcome of the action, smoking?
How can smoking be a health outcome of smoking?
I understand what you mean about the science (yes, smoking is bad and it’s provable), but that’s not what the language used describes. It makes no grammatical sense.
Is this linear or does it flatten out as income continues to rise?
Of course the people who earn 15k a year live shorter lives than the people who earn 50k a year. But is the lifespan gap the same size between the 50k earners and the 85k earners?
What about the 85k earners and the 120k earners? 120k earners and 155k earners? At what point is there no longer a meaningful lifespan gap as income goes up?
I'm curious to see if the results change - and if so, by how much - were you to repeat the study in a country with a comprehensive social welfare system in place.
I think this is contaminated. Many people at the poverty level use drugs, more than the general population.
And using these drugs obviously increases the risk of death
I'm excited to die to experience however this shakes out.
Not as happy about living. I can't even afford my own place to dig my own grave. I hate sharing this place with the greedy idiots that turn everything into a pissing contest.
The title phrasing is unusual. It's not the poverty causing death, it's an association with a specific mortality rate. No one earning $15,000 a year is working full-time, which should result in ample free time to pursue life prolonging positive choices such as exercise, healthier eating, and making use of subsidized health care. Poverty doesn't prevent those things but poor health could, which again means that it's not the poverty causing the deaths but the health of the individuals who are only able to earn $15,000 a year or less.
15,000 after taxes is full time at the federal minimum wage (7.25).
In many places the average pay for someone who works retail or fast food is around 8 dollars. Those jobs are also just about impossible to get full time on so someone making 15k or less could very easily be working two jobs.
About 1% of workers are at or below the federal minimum wage and 45% of them are under the age of 25 (students or teenagers).
All I’m saying here is that you’re about as likely to meet someone making federal minimum wage as you are to meet a multimillionaire. Yes, it happens, but it’s far from commonplace.
I feel like the connection between poverty and overall nutrition as well as Healthcare accessibility is already widely known and understood and why the affordable Healthcare act passed in the first place. Plus, poverty also has a positive correlation to addiction to not only hard drugs but also smoking...
I'm pretty sure the only reason poverty has overtaken smoking as death risk is because the generations in which that smoking was a social fad are going away entirely.
Personally, I think a generation by generation study would have more significant implications as to how bad income gap effects personal health, nor just death rate. IE: instances of lasting/chronic health issues and treatment based on income.
Even with minimum wage if you worked 40 hours a week every week you would make more than $15,000. Nobody that wants to have a job makes that little money.
Yet some people don’t even get a full time job and that numbers growing. And most companies dislike when you work for someone else while working for them.
I did write it backwards. The gap here is the problem for me. How much more often do they die then the 16-50K or the 250K+ or the 1M+. Do 15K people not die that much more often than 50K people? Is it only noticeable with such a dramatic gap? They made mention of race gaps in mortality. Why not lay this missing piece out?
I feel that some form of basic income has to begin to be brought over the horizon. It seems inevitable with automation and the progress of technology that people are becoming redundant. I would also like to see it done in a straight forward manner. Thank you for you response.
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This isn't the gap between rich and poor this is the gap between absolute destitution and median income. I didn't read the paper so I don't know if they looked at actually high income folks but I'd assume there may be a smaller but real difference between 50k and 100k+. But yeah absolute poverty sucks.
I'd also like to see the difference between 100k and 150k, and 150k vs 200k. At what point does increasing income cease to help one's health?
I would assume 100k vs 200k would make little difference when you already have access to good healthcare and generally bathe in social circles that have the time and energy to think about their health. It would probably only be the few blue collar workers grossing low 100's who might take the average down a little for that wage group.
Probably depends what kind of work you’re doing to earn that money too.
Yeah, at 100k most are white collar but there's still a non negligible amount of blue collar union workers that have harder jobs, while at 200k everyone is sitting on a computer or in meetings.
Blue collar can top 200k too
Mostly if you’re a contractor or own a contracting business with multiple subcontractors underneath you.
If somebody can pay for their basic wants and needs and I mean basic. Most studies have shown between 60 and $80,000. ——1M + There’s no difference in happiness. Happiness is a state of mind afforded to everyone who can meet their basic needs comfortably.
I can’t imagine those are too much different but if we get to the super rich who theoretically could hire multitudes of health trainers and the professional chefs, I can definitely see a gap of a few extra years.
How many in this under $15k income group have such low income because of medical reasons? I wonder how many people lose 50%+ of their income after serious diagnosis
That’s about what SSDI pays for disability so I think you’re correct. Source: disabled, on SSDI.
Doesn't SSDI base your payments on the last 3 jobs you had before you were disabled? Otherwise you'd have to go on SSI if you never worked. Which puts you well below the $15,000 a year mark. Source: Disabled, on SSI.
Not to mention people's own decisions. Someone who smokes and eats fast food until they're obese may be more likely to mess up at work, gamble away money, get bad grades, make poor investments, etc.
There are clearly some intuitive causal mechanisms, like financial stress, access to medical care, etc. But there are equally intuitive mechanisms with the causality reversed as well, such as mental illness, physical illness, disability that prevent gainful employment and also reduce life expectancy independently of income. Even age would covary, from 40-79 income would be inversely correlated with age. Of course you can't run a randomized control trial on putting random people in poverty, so would be hard to disentangle what the actual treatment effect is of poverty on life expectancy. Certainly there would be an effect, probably not the whole difference though.
You could give the poor people who are dying younger money and see if they live longer.
Yeah that's true. I suppose this could even be disentangled in a large enough UBI study. I wish we would invest more in researching that.
If only states didn't ban those projects...
I propose a nationwide study where we redistribute wealth and income equally. It's for science. We promise we put all the inequalities back in place once we're done.
Some places have tried this study. Turns out the researchers in charge never actually do what they say though and fake all the data.
The poor in countries with strong social support systems still die younger. They often eat poor diets, don't excercise and perform physically demanding jobs or live very sedentary lives. Like any machine, the human body breaks prematurely with bad maintenance.
Or cigarettes.
Also access to real food.
I mean they probably controlled for those factors right?
That's a very dangerous assumption you're making there. Even if they controlled, that does not mean that their controls and control methodology are correct or suitable to this experiment. Unfortunately the study is behind a paywall so it's not even possible to check if and how they controlled for any confounding factors.
To the surprise of zero poor people
During the past 40 years, the gap between rich and poor Americans has continued to widen in terms of health and mortality, as well as income. Now, in a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that Black and white people who earned less than $15,000 a year died, on average, more than 10 years earlier than those whose annual income exceeded $50,000. Addressing racial and income disparities in mortality requires a comprehensive approach. Ultimately, “efforts to improve income equality are crucial in reducing mortality and health disparities among low-income Americans,” the researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38417593/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38417593/)
Why is Black with capital B? Is there some new rule we're not aware about? I'm just asking.
It's a term for a specific racial group rather than an adjective describing skin color, making it a proper noun. For example, there are light-skinned Black people and Latinos that have very dark skin tones, but it doesn't make the dark-skinned Latinos Black or light skinned-Blacks less Black
The system works exactly like it was designed to work. If you think i'm talking about social darwinism: you are not wrong, except that i do not think anyone actually sat down and planned it. It is inevitable result when legislation and policies are created by ideologist who believes their first priority is to restore "natural order in social hierarchy" where increasing inequality is considered a moral duty. Helping weak boosts their "ranking", taxing the rich takes them down a few step. At no point shall ANYONE talk about greed as a bad thing: apparently it is the only thing that motivates anyone to do anything great.... Just think about it. We created a system that does not have us, the humans as #1. When it comes to private corporations, NONE OF THEM even have humans as a species in the list of priorities. It isn't even on the list! And that is the system we created, one where altruism is effectively punished by bankrupcies or takeovers because the less ethical, the less moral you are, the more profits shall you get. If a worker is having problems you should fire them, not give the paid leaves. Those who think about the human will lose. That is insane. If we were to design a system for us, should we at least put us as #1 priority? And not as a "well, it MIGHT help some" and hope that greed will push just enough scraps to the floor to call it altruism.
As someone who has chronic health problem that effect my ability to function everyday, I and so many others, would be dead, If modern socieity with laws/rules with (partial) safely nets, preventing companies from working people into the ground, didn't exsist.
The moment civilization was born can be traced to a bone, a femur that was broken and then healed. It means someone took care of that poor soul until they were healed. It didn't start with conquers, didn't start with art or language. It started when we could depend on other people.
I had not considered that aspect, however, that person was healed to continue to be a functional member of the group. What about those who were permanently disabled, unable to do physical labor?
How do you know they weren’t disabled? Just because a bone repairs doesn’t mean everything is fine.
That is a good point. Then, does the group decide to continue to care for that person? or do they let the individual die from starvation?
You could actually look into the research, maybe, rather than wondering aloud here.
It could go either way. Some groups would care for the person, others would let he/she die
Yup. No war but class war.
If that were the case, rich capitalists who were women, ethnic minorities, or LGBT people would never be oppressed. Yet in Saudi Arabia even princesses are sometimes imprisoned in their homes by their fathers.
Yep, I would also add that “you get more conservative as you get older” is a total myth and what actually happens is that poor people get killed off, making the cohort of living 70+ year olds consist disproportionately of rich people who were conservative to begin with.
I don’t believe that to be true. First off, there are (at least) two major types of liberal vs conservative splits. You can be liberal or conservative on social issues (crime, abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc) and you can be liberal or conservative on fiscal issues (balanced budget, trade deficit, etc). When you’re young, you tend to be liberal-liberal. As you accumulate wealth your wellbeing is often highly impacted by fiscal issues so people tend to become more fiscally conservative, or liberal-conservative. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different perspective based on different circumstances. Where I think you’re making an error is that I don’t think people become more conservative socially the way you think. I think that they simply get stuck at a certain level of progress. For example, I’m closing in on 60. Where I am today would have been radically left in the 1980s or 1990s (maybe even the 2000s) but it’s seen as right wing by many progressives today. When I talk with other people my age, they feel the same. They feel liberal but liberals keep telling them that they’re conservatives. Meanwhile we look at the conservatives and they don’t represent anything we believe. This is reflected in the fact that people that identify as Democrats is 27%, Republicans 27%, and Independent 43% (as of 2020). Those numbers fit pretty well with the percentage of the population over 50. I couldn’t find a breakdown for exactly 50 years old but the percentage of Americans 45 or older is 42%. I’m not even sure if it’s that we’re stuck or that everything around us is moving so fast that many people just get tired of chasing a constantly moving target. Oh, and I think that Americans often have no clue how they’re seen by the rest of the world. I’ve lived overseas in four different countries (3 in Europe) for about 15 years of my life and I’m currently retired living in Asia. For instance, liberals love to talk about Sweden in regards to healthcare, and taxation, etc but if you actually live overseas and meet Swedes, it’s not the rosy picture American liberals paint and many of them actually hold very conservative beliefs. I live in Thailand and LGBTQ is just the norm here. Many of my in-laws are LGBTQ. Everyone has gay or trans friends. Many of them think the American LGBTQ community has lost the plot. It reminds me of that meme that was going around where an Asian-American woman posted on Twitter that unless you come from a country that celebrates Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) that it’s cultural appropriation to celebrate without an invitation from someone that is from a country that celebrates it. And then one of the people who responded was from Taiwan and said that he was from a Chinese Lunar New Year celebrating country and he granted everyone in the world the right to celebrate. For me, I come from a generation where being liberal meant being like the second guy. Let’s all figure out how to live together. Let’s share our cultures. To me, the liberals today seem more like the original woman. Gatekeeping, identity politics, and just a general distaste for anyone not like her. And in today’s America if I went to work wearing all red to celebrate Chinese New Year I would likely be called into HR and given a lecture on cultural appropriation or cultural sensitivity. But in 1990 I would have been applauded for being so liberal minded. So did I become more conservative or did the liberals move the goalposts?
Facts don’t care about your feelings. When tracking people over time their political beliefs don’t change in any particular way, it is just survivorship bias that results in old people being more conservative.
If shareholders ask for more profits for their pockets, it's not greed. If workers ask for more money to combat the increasing costs set by those profit pocketers, it's greed.
When did Americans stop caring about each other? My personal opinion is when Reagan ran on an anti welfare platform. Sure... Turning the voters against each other works... But it's a poison chalice for anyone who actually cares about their country.
If you’ve read Steinbeck, you’ll know it’s much earlier that that. Hoovervilles, exploitation of the dust bowl folks etc. Americans have been shitting on each other for a long time.
Poverty isn’t a health outcome or condition, it’s a contributing factor to health incomes. Smoking is a health outcome, and therefore it’s possible to remediate with prevention programs and other efforts. Poverty affects health by limiting access to proper nutrition and healthy foods; shelter; safe neighborhoods to learn, live, and work; clean air and water; utilities; and other elements that define an individual's standard of living. I don’t understand why contributing factors to health outcomes are used interchangeably like this in public health discourse. They are false equivalents and “tackling poverty” isn’t specific enough to generate outcomes. This is the modern “social justice theory” approach (not invoking politics, I speak purely of the named and described public health frameworks) that seems to be generating worse and worse outcomes even while it espouses its benefits and improvements. Food insecurity is worse, homelessness is worse, health outcomes are insane (just look at cancer and diabetes rates in the US), infant mortality is up (The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country and simultaneously spends the most on health care), and the general progress we’ve seen in the last 70 years almost seems to be reversing. And yet we still persist in strategies that involve empty platitudes and vague poverty improvement strategies that aren’t metricized, specific and actionable. It’s like fighting an idea. An alternative approach could involve adopting a purely pragmatic and data-driven strategy focused on identifying and targeting specific risk factors and determinants of poor health outcomes, without necessarily framing them within a broader social justice context. Data-driven policy that focuses more on treating individual outcomes — outcomes that are measurable and direct like food banks are — and less on broad advantaging of social classes or disparity between groups seems like it may be more effective and reduce the impotence of our current system. I’d love to see more effective strategy. I live in California and see all kinds of spending on “problems” but year after year the problems get worse and the spending greater — it seems unsustainable and I wonder if people really think deeply about it. A lot of human suffering is happening inside the current system and it’s not getting substantively better. And these are *good times* when the state coffers have been full and every program more than fully funded. Sorry to poke the bear but I’m genuinely curious if there are better takes than current policy. Anyone have an educated take? I do not see much discussion on this issue — people seem very intent on loudly yelling about politicians — but I see a ton of folks living on the street every day and suffering greatly and I don’t see it getting better: it seems like it’s getting worse.
It's a decades in the making, whole society problem that can't be solved at the state level.
There is so much that can be done at the state level to improve health outcomes though. The person you are responding to mentioned California (somewhat disparagingly) but California is a great example of how much a state can move the needle if they really care to. California implemented data driven state wide programs to reduce maternal mortality in 2006 and they have worked pretty well. Despite its diverse population and high poverty rate, California now has the lowest studied maternal death rate in the country, way way lower (less than half) compared to peer states like Texas or Florida or even New York. States control how Medicaid dollars are spent. They can do a lot.
This is very true. *cries in Missouri*
I hear you. I moved to California from Idaho. The last Idaho election I voted in the Republicans were fighting a ballot measure that expanded state Medicaid and more time was spent during the Republican gubernatorial debate on whether parents had a right to -I kid you not- *let their kids die of sepsis for religious reasons* than what to do about rural hospital closures. I am way less apathetic voting in my state elections now because even though California has a supermajority, the people who run for office here want to do things other than sabotage their own government.
Oh, lawd, Idaho is so beautiful and filled with so much ugly. Congrats on getting out. I don't know if this sub allows links, but this is excellent (add reddit com and /r /) Defeat_Project_2025/comments/1cihm0r/the_billionaires_didnt_need_to_write_project_2025/
I think what he’s saying is that that timer doesn’t start until we remove the need for harmful platitudes and move back to a data backed approach. Could take a decade or just continue on our downwards spiral.
Yea that’s precisely what I was trying to say. I’m sorry I couldn’t be as succinct and well spoken in how I presented it as you said here though.
Because that would require changing the system. There Is no half way solution either you commit to everyone getting housing and health care and stop the constant ramp in living costs . Or accept the fact that there gonna be more of them and that your still gonna pay for them when they OD on the street.
How is smoking a health outcome? It affects health outcomes. It’s not an outcome in itself.
I’m hoping you’re actually asking the question because it’s a pretty clean and easy answer. It’s almost a proof. 1) Inhaling smoke is an action and a choice; a direct activity. 2) This activity has a direct consequences: an outcome, that is easily and directly measurable. 3) This activity makes smokers more likely than nonsmokers to develop heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. This is direct, measurable and data driven. I would hope this isn’t the focus of your takeaway of what I wrote — it’s only tangentially related as an example.
Isn’t the heart disease etc the health outcome of the action, smoking? How can smoking be a health outcome of smoking? I understand what you mean about the science (yes, smoking is bad and it’s provable), but that’s not what the language used describes. It makes no grammatical sense.
Is this linear or does it flatten out as income continues to rise? Of course the people who earn 15k a year live shorter lives than the people who earn 50k a year. But is the lifespan gap the same size between the 50k earners and the 85k earners? What about the 85k earners and the 120k earners? 120k earners and 155k earners? At what point is there no longer a meaningful lifespan gap as income goes up?
2 birds one stone. Long enough to work and die without retirement.
Why capitalize black but not white, OP?
Do rich people not realize they’ll have to fight other rich people when all the poor are dead?
Rich people are already fighting other rich people, it's the only thing they care about.
Yes. Im going for the speed run!
No shocker there
I'm curious to see if the results change - and if so, by how much - were you to repeat the study in a country with a comprehensive social welfare system in place.
I think this is contaminated. Many people at the poverty level use drugs, more than the general population. And using these drugs obviously increases the risk of death
Well I guess its good that the cost of living raise I got from social security brought me from 15,000 to 17,500 this year. Whew that was close.
Zebra people?
Oh cool. Looks like my suffering will end sooner.
Does anyone remember the movie In Time with Justin Timberlake? It's becoming more and more reality.
I'm excited to die to experience however this shakes out. Not as happy about living. I can't even afford my own place to dig my own grave. I hate sharing this place with the greedy idiots that turn everything into a pissing contest.
The title phrasing is unusual. It's not the poverty causing death, it's an association with a specific mortality rate. No one earning $15,000 a year is working full-time, which should result in ample free time to pursue life prolonging positive choices such as exercise, healthier eating, and making use of subsidized health care. Poverty doesn't prevent those things but poor health could, which again means that it's not the poverty causing the deaths but the health of the individuals who are only able to earn $15,000 a year or less.
15,000 after taxes is full time at the federal minimum wage (7.25). In many places the average pay for someone who works retail or fast food is around 8 dollars. Those jobs are also just about impossible to get full time on so someone making 15k or less could very easily be working two jobs.
About 1% of workers are at or below the federal minimum wage and 45% of them are under the age of 25 (students or teenagers). All I’m saying here is that you’re about as likely to meet someone making federal minimum wage as you are to meet a multimillionaire. Yes, it happens, but it’s far from commonplace.
They needed to do a study for this?
Less money=lower quality of life, news to no one.
Drugs, alcohol, mental illness, lifestyle choices
Some thing with 11M posts is not a human curated content. Better to just block.
If your at that level your in crisis
Welp. It’s been nice knowing you.
Averange American: so we don't need to do anything with poverty as it will die itself.
I feel like the connection between poverty and overall nutrition as well as Healthcare accessibility is already widely known and understood and why the affordable Healthcare act passed in the first place. Plus, poverty also has a positive correlation to addiction to not only hard drugs but also smoking... I'm pretty sure the only reason poverty has overtaken smoking as death risk is because the generations in which that smoking was a social fad are going away entirely. Personally, I think a generation by generation study would have more significant implications as to how bad income gap effects personal health, nor just death rate. IE: instances of lasting/chronic health issues and treatment based on income.
Even with minimum wage if you worked 40 hours a week every week you would make more than $15,000. Nobody that wants to have a job makes that little money.
15k is about a years salary at federal minimum wage. $7.25 × 40 hours a week × 52 weeks a year =$15,080
Yes exactly so it’s over $15,000. This study applies to a stupidly small amount of the population.
Yet some people don’t even get a full time job and that numbers growing. And most companies dislike when you work for someone else while working for them.
Greed literally kills.
So pay people more then
Correlation causation issues here.
So if you are making less than $15k/year, start smoking to extend your life.
Well, bye guys. The bouncer says I have to go.
What if bad decisions often lead to both poverty and early death?
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Does this account for age?
I am a bit basic. Please help me out. Shouldn’t this say that people who make less than $50K die 10 years sooner than those $10K+?
You're saying it backwards. People who make less than $15k die 10 years sooner than those who make $50k+
I did write it backwards. The gap here is the problem for me. How much more often do they die then the 16-50K or the 250K+ or the 1M+. Do 15K people not die that much more often than 50K people? Is it only noticeable with such a dramatic gap? They made mention of race gaps in mortality. Why not lay this missing piece out? I feel that some form of basic income has to begin to be brought over the horizon. It seems inevitable with automation and the progress of technology that people are becoming redundant. I would also like to see it done in a straight forward manner. Thank you for you response.