In this essay, I review Robert Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 which is concerned with the past, present, and future of human health. Fogel’s work places great emphasis on nutrition, not only for the history of health, but for explaining aspects of current...

Deaton and Lubotsky (2003) found that the robust positive relationship across American cities between mortality and income inequality became small, insignificant, and/or non-robust once they controlled for the fraction of each city’s population that is black. Ash and Robinson (Ash, M., &...

The great promise of surveys in which people report their own level of life satisfaction is that such surveys might provide a straightforward and easily collected measure of individual or national well-being that aggregates over the various components of well-being, such as economic status,...

We investigate age-specific mortality in Britain and the United States since 1950. Neither trends in income nor in income inequality provide plausible explanations. Britain and the US had different patterns of income growth but similar patterns of mortality decline. Patterns of income inequality...

What is inequality in health? Are economists' standard tools for measuring income inequality relevant or useful for measuring it? Does income protect health and does income inequality pose a hazard to health? In this paper, I discuss two different concepts of health inequality and relate each of...

Standard methods of poverty measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

What are the determinants of the health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health-care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health-care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics...

A number of studies have found that mortality rates are positively correlated with income inequality across the cities and states of the US. We argue that this correlation is confounded by the effects of racial composition. Across states and MSAs, the fraction of the population that is black is...

There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In...

I present a model of mortality and income which attempts to integrate the “gradient,” the negative relationship between income and mortality, with the Wilkinson hypothesis, that income inequality poses a risk to health. I postulate that individual health is negatively affected by relative...