| The study is paywalled but it looks like poverty is just correlated with death. The most likely explanation is that they have a common cause. In studies that can differentiate between environmental and genetic causes, longevity has some genetic influence but no or very little influence from poverty. For example, from [1]: > The heritability of longevity was estimated to be 0.26 for males
and 0.23 for females. [...] There is no evidence for an impact of shared (family) environment. In this context, "shared family environment" encompasses everything in the environment that is shared between children in the same family, including income. Another study [2] shows that longevity has substantial genetic cause: > Half of the variation in susceptibility to mortality is genetic: findings from Swedish twin survival data Note that these two studies only include childhood poverty. What about adult poverty? From [3]: > While we find some evidence that permanent income shocks lead to poorer health behaviour, we find no evidence that it affects directly any health measures. Despite sizable shocks to income at the cohort level during our period of analysis, which can be empirically linked to changes in consumption expenditures, we fail to find any changes in (cohort) health, even if we allow those shocks to affect health with a lag. Note that this is health, not mortality, but they're related. It suggests that the stronger underlying cause is, in the paper's terms, "underlying factors" such as genetics, innate ability, or childhood poverty. Childhood poverty we already know from behavior genetics is not causal. There's other evidence out there along similar lines. If the new paper used a research design that could actually determine causality, or could at least rule out some ways in which a common cause would explain the data, it would be more interesting. [1] Herskind AM, McGue M, Holm NV, Sørensen TI, Harvald B, Vaupel JW. The heritability of human longevity: a population-based study of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870-1900. Hum Genet. 1996 Mar;97(3):319-23. doi: 10.1007/BF02185763. PMID: 8786073. [2] Yashin AI, Iachine IA, Harris JR. Half of the variation in susceptibility to mortality is genetic: findings from Swedish twin survival data. Behav Genet. 1999 Jan;29(1):11-9. doi: 10.1023/a:1021481620934. PMID: 10371754. [3] Adda, Jérôme, et al. “THE IMPACT OF INCOME SHOCKS ON HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM COHORT DATA.” Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 7, no. 6, 2009, pp. 1361–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40601206. Accessed 22 May 2023. |