THE LEGACY OF LONGEVITY: PERSISTENT INEQUALITIES IN UK LIFE EXPECTANCY 1500-2016
That global average life expectancy has more than doubled within the previous two centuries is—by any objective standard—something miraculous to behold, and the academic literature across the fields of economics, demography, public health, and evolutionary biology have all contributed to our understanding of the mechanisms behind the unequal variations in demographic transition. We focus on the effect of socioeconomic status to explore inequalities across health gradients between the tertiary universe of descendants of the British aristocracy and the general population. This is made possible through the creation of an unparalleled dataset containing information on 127,523 aristocratic offspring up to three generations deep, meticulously curated from 7,161 individual sources including 6,756 instances of direct correspondence. Using this semi-structured free-text data on date of birth and death, we develop life-table based methodologies to provide five distinct findings. We first contest the infamous ‘peerage paradox’: that life spans between aristocrats (and their families) were equivalent to the general population until the turn of the 19th century. Secondly, the mortality transition of elites occurred around 100 years earlier than for the general public (with considerable relative improvements of approximately 30% during the industrial revolution(s)). Thirdly, male aristocratic offspring fared less well than the general population during both the Great War and the Second World War, consistent with the existing evidence base. Fourthly, life expectancies equalized at the same time as the introduction of the National Health Service Act 1946. Finally, tentative evidence suggests that this gap has, however, begun to re-emerge since the 1980s.
Date: 19 February 2020, 17:00 (Wednesday, 5th week, Hilary 2020)
Venue: Nuffield College, New Road OX1 1NF
Venue Details: Clay Room
Speaker: Charles Rahal (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Nuffield College
Organisers: Nan Dirk de Graaf (Nuffield College), Dave Kirk (Nuffield College)
Organiser contact email address: maxine.collett@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Nuffield College Sociology Seminars
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Maxine Collett