Why Life Expectancy Varies Greatly In The U.S.

How long are you likely to live in America? And why? We'll look at race, gender, money- and American lifespans now.

If time on Earth matters, life span matters. And American life expectancy is in motion. Overall, an American newborn’s life expectancy is 79.7 years. But there is a lot of variation. Rich now living much longer than poor. Blacks narrowing the life expectancy gap with whites. Middle class whites in trouble. This hour On Point: We’re looking at who lives how long, and why.

Plus, we’ll look at the latest compensation for hedge fund chiefs. Like Ken Griffin. He made $1.7 billion last year.
-Tom Ashbrook 

Andrew Fenelon, Senior Service Fellow in the National Center for Health Statistics at the Center for Disease Control. (@andyfenelon)

Robert Hummer, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina.

Tyson Brown, professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. (@tysonbrown)

Black Americans See Gains in Life Expectancy — "The suicide rate for black men declined from 1999 to 2014, making them the only racial group to experience a drop. Infant mortality is down by more than a fifth among blacks since the late 1990s, double the decline for whites. Births to teenage mothers, which tend to have higher infant mortality rates, have dropped by 64 percent among blacks since 1995, faster than for whites." (New York Times)

Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America — "Globally, the inequality in life expectancy is shrinking. Unfortunately, this effect, which the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has aptly described as a “survival revolution,” does not apply to our country. Here, according to a study published in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the numbers are moving in the opposite direction. It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income." (New Yorker)

Life Expectancy Study: It's Not Just What You Make, It's Where You Live— Chetty and his co-authors collected more than 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to try to measure the relationship between income and life expectancy. "There are vast gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans," Chetty said. "Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live about 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States." (NPR)

A new annual ranking of hedge fund managers shows that the 25 best-paid ones together raked in almost $13 billion last year.  The two top earners took in $1.7 billion each. That’s a ton of money

Alexandra Steveson, business reporter for the New York Times. (@jotted)