This city is full of parks that invite exercise and bike lanes that make commuting a workout. It's home to social services that tend the poor, and taxpayers who willingly fund them. Smoking is banned at restaurants and bars — as well as in workplaces, at bus stops, throughout public housing, at charity bingo games and even inside stores that sell tobacco.
These factors may help explain why the poor live longer in the San Francisco area than they do in much of the rest of the country. According to a large study published today about how income and geography shape life expectancies, a poor person living in the San Francisco area can expect to live about three years longer than someone making the same income in Detroit. That difference is equivalent to how much national life expectancies would rise if we eliminated cancer.
"If you think about the cancer comparison, having cancer is not just about having a shorter life. It's also about having an unhealthier life, a much lower quality of life," says Stanford economist Raj Chetty, the lead author of the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Seven economists, from MIT, Harvard, the U.S. Treasury and McKinsey and Co., were co-authors.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...r-means-dying-young/]
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