WASHINGTON — Wealthy and middle-class Baby Boomers can expect to live substantially longer than their parents’ generation. Meanwhile, life expectancy for the poor hasn’t increased and may even be declining, according to a report published this week by several leading economists.
Call it a growing inequality of death — and it means that the poor ultimately may collect less in money from some of the government’s safety net programs than the rich.
As of 2010, the average, upper income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he’s lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report.
The corresponding life expectancies among women are 92 and 78 years of age.
The authors considered the effect of these shifts on the federal budget and the full range of entitlements. As their years lengthen, the rich will benefit more from Social Security, a program intended to help protect the poor from poverty in old age.
Economists and public health experts have long known that while the U.S. life expectancy has nearly doubled over the past century, more affluent Americans have been dying later.
The new report, ordered by Congress and published by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, attempts to project those trends into the future. How long can the Boomers alive today expect to draw checks from Social Security?
Peter Orszag, one of the chairmen of the committee that wrote the report and a former senior official in the Obama administration, said he was surprised by the differences among this group by income.
“The bottom of the socioeconomic distribution isn’t experiencing any material increase in life expectancy,” he said.
Those disparities are partly due to the varying lifestyles of the rich and poor, who are more likely to be obese and to smoke cigarettes. More affluent Americans have quit smoking en masse over the past few decades, but the poor have not. If more of them give up the habit in the future, some could live longer.
Yet factors such as obesity and tobacco account for less than a third of the gap in life expectancy, according to the report. Maybe the gap is due to stress, or maybe it develops during early childhood or even before birth.
Researchers haven’t identified the causes with precision, but whatever they are, these trends have important consequences for who those who rely on federal entitlements.
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