High income individuals are healthier and live longer than those at the bottom of the income distribution. Recent research reveals a similar connection between a family’s income and the health of its children. But does low household income cause poor child health outcomes, or are low income and poor child health both caused by some other factor? Is redistributing income to poor families an effective way to improve children’s health?
The correlation between socio-economic status (SES) and health has been demonstrated for virtually all health indicators, including mortality, incidence of disease, cardiovascular risk factors, and a variety of biomarkers. But what explains this powerful link? With support from the Foundation, economists Barbara Wolfe and William Evans and biomedical researcher Teresa Seeman will assemble a multidisciplinary working group to address the pathways that forge connections between SES and health.
In the past several decades, levels of income inequality in the United States have soared. Despite unprecedented disparities of wealth, government spending on social programs has nonetheless remained remarkably low. At the same time, private charitable contributions have surged. As a result, the United States is now exceptional in two strikingly different ways: it is the developed nation with the greatest share of private contributions but also the highest level of income inequality.
According to recent estimates, slightly less than a quarter of all American families have received inheritances or financially significant gifts from living relatives or friends. These transfers are unequally distributed: one study found that only 10 percent of families with net worth below $25,000 received any inheritances or gifts, compared with 45 percent of families with net worth above $1 million. Even more striking, the size of transfers received by the wealthy families was more than 25 times as large as the transfers received by the poorest families.
Utah is a “pre-emergent” gateway: a place with fast-growing immigrant populations as of the 1990s that may continue to grow as a destination. Latinos make up slightly more than 11 percent of the population in the state, up from 4.9 percent in 1990. About 47 percent of them are undocumented. To many outsiders, Utah calls to mind images of the Mormon Church, large and close-knit families, and a socially conservative electorate.
While blatant discrimination and racial harassment are stymied by strong social norms, a stealthier form of racism persists in America today. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, 55 percent of white and 83 percent of black Americans believe that racial profiling is widespread. This may be seen as a first step on a long path that leads young men of color to high rates of incarceration and low levels of trust in public authorities.