Why poor Americans are dying younger. (Orszag/Bloomberg)

Extraordinary Stress and Pessimism Take a Grim Toll
Why poor Americans are dying younger.

by Peter R. Orszag
January 17, 2018, 6:00 AM CST

Life expectancy in the U.S. declined slightly in 2016, as it did in 2015, and — at least as important — the overall trends continue to mask increasing disparities across socioeconomic groups. Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution helps explain why. Her important new book is the empirical version of "Hillbilly Elegy."

I have long suspected that stress and lack of hope are to blame for widening the gap in life expectancy between lower and higher earners. Graham uses survey data to support this explanation, documenting striking differences in stress and optimism across segments of the population.

It's little surprise that low-income Americans report significantly higher levels of daily stress than high-income Americans do. But Graham also notes that the type of stress they typically experience is especially harmful to health, because it seems to be outside the individual’s locus of control. She argues that “stress that is associated with daily struggles and circumstances beyond individuals’ control — as is more common for the poor — has more negative effects than that associated with goal achievement.”

One example of what can cause this type of stress is an unpredictable work schedule. More than 40 percent of early-career hourly workers in the U.S. learn of their work schedules less than a week in advance, recent evidence shows. Among retail and food-service workers, almost 90 percent face variation in at least half of their usual work hours.
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The U.S. stands out on many of these measures compared with other countries. The gap in stress levels between low- and high-income people is noticeably smaller in Latin American countries, for example. Low-income American workers are also less likely than Latin Americans to believe that “hard work gets you ahead.” And Blanchflower and Oswald show that reported pain is higher in the U.S. than in any other country they study. “As the U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world, and in principle might be expected to have one of the most comfortable lifestyles in the world,” they note, “it seems strange — to put it at its mildest — that the nation should report such a lot of pain.”
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more: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-17/extraordinary-stress-and-pessimism-take-a-grim-toll