That global 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 variations across demographic transitions in mortality. We focus on the effect of income and status differentials on health gradients through the life expectancies of the tertiary universe of descendants of the British aristocracy and the general population. We use a dataset of 127,523 offspring up to three generations deep, meticulously curated from 7,161 individual sources including 6,756 instances of direct correspondence with aristocratic families. Using this semi-structured genealogical data on date of birth and death (in addition to their relationship to existing peers) and information on the general population, we develop lifetable-based methodologies to provide five distinct findings. We first fail to replicate and generally rally against the so called ‘peerage paradox’; the idea that lifespans 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 that of 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 on the role of aristocratic military officers. 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. An extensive manual (and computational) data-verification exercise confirms the validity of the data resource profile, and additional structural break tests are consistent with voting reforms and the introduction of key policies and legislation prior to the general decline of the power of privilege.
Presented by:
Dr Charles Rahal (University of Oxford)
Date & time:
14 Jun 2023 12:30 pm - 14 Jun 2023 13:30 pm
Venue:
2N2.4.16
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