SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF ADULT, AGING AND ELDERLY HEALTH

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We propose to examine the social determinants of health, particularly the relationship between income, consumption, education, race, and health. Our overarching theme is the attempt to disentangle the relative contributions to health of social versus medical determinants, and we explore this theme within six specific research questions. (1) Why are mortality rates in the US higher in places where African Americans are a larger share of the population? What are the relative roles of racism and poverty on the one hand, and provision of medical services on the other? (2) How does the way that self-reported health status deteriorates with age depend on work, income, and gender? Is manual work a primary determinant of the speed of aging? (3) Is the gradient in health determined by technical progress in medicine? In particular, does the gradient widen when there is particularly rapid technical progress for a specific disease? (4) How does the gradient grow in youth and diminish in old-age? How much do social factors matter when history is adequately controlled? (5) How does health vary with the allocation of goods within the household? (6) How do declines in age-specific mortality relate to (widely varying) national patterns of growth and inequality on the one hand, and to more or less internationally uniform changes in technical progress in medical care on the other? What is the role of national patterns of health-related-behaviors? Each of these questions is tied together by the fact that there are competing answers, some of which are largely "social" and some of which are largely "medical." Each is also an important research project in its own right.