10/12/2015 – Income Inequality Grows With Age and Shapes Later Years (The New York Times)

Socioeconomic inequality, he noted, helps determine who gets to grow old. Dr. Abramson’s book “The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years,” and a report from the National Academy of Sciences last month on the growing life expectancy gap, underscore the effect of income and education on old age.

Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-chairman of the committee that studied the gap, told me he was staggered by its findings.Dividing the population into lifetime earning levels, the committee found that men born in 1930 who reached age 50 had a life expectancy of another 26.6 years if they were in the lowest income bracket and 31.7 years in the highest bracket. But projections for men born in 1960 showed no improvement for the lowest earners — and an additional seven years for the highest. In three decades, the life expectancy gap had widened from about five years to more than 12 — “shockingly large,” Dr. Lee said.

Read the full article in The New York Times.