For life expectancy, money matters
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
A good friend of mine was diagnosed with Liver Cancer around the same time as Steve Jobs. Both lived near SF, and both were put on the waiting list for transplants around the same time (+- 2 months). She was young, very sick and otherwise healthy so was a good candidate to be high on the list.
Then I heard about Steve "moving" to Tennessee [1] to get on a different, shorter transplant list - and thus receiving the transplant needed. She died shortly after, never receiving a transplant, while Jobs lived two more years.
This is not a complaint or gripe about fairness, but just a demonstration of how two very different people in a very similar predicament had massively different outcomes based almost entirely on wealth, fame and power. Money buys access, which create options, which enable health, freedom and longevity. It's so simple and obvious I don't know how people can argue otherwise.
[1] http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/southern-transplants-ho...
Because its terribly depressing for many people to admit it.
It's just as possible to spend yourself into an early grave.
So as long as we can't grow organs, I think it is preferable to not create that kind of incentive.
On the other hand, you could argue that the fact there is no market will hinder some innovation. But given the scarcity of organs, I am pretty sure than producing mechanical hearts or eyes would find pretty of interested people anyway.
Even if you did solve the problem, other problems in the stack would start popping up.
Being rich always helps.
That fact that something already happens while being illegal is not an argument in itself against decriminalizing it.
Murder and rape happen too despite being illegal, for example.
No, all "precious resources should not be randomly allocated". But transplant organs should be allocated as they are [1].
For other precious resources, it depends on the resource. E.g. if we're talking about water, it's better balance farming and drinking needs, which are not the same in all areas, instead of randomly distributing it.
[1] Note that the use of "randomly" is misguiding -- organs are not randomly allocated, except in the final distribution AFTER lots of non random factors have been already used to guide the waiting list (compatibility, chances of success, urgency, distance from donor, etc).
That's the OP's point: all of these are subject to the influence of wealth.
Compatibility: better supportive care keeping the person healthier on the defective organ. (An actual mismatch, like blood type, is a random variable.)
Chances of success: depends on the medical affidavits from "second opinions" that you can afford to shop around for. This perhaps won't work in extreme cases, like an 80 year old on death's door vs. an 11 year old diagnosed with an early stage defect, but it's rarely that clear.
Urgency: Jitters over the stock price of Apple is surely going to weigh Steve Jobs' transplant as more "urgent".
Distance from donor: obviously nothing more than a trivial obstacle for the wealthy.
That's indeed subject to wealth -- but it's not the kind of compatibility the system looks for. Rather size, blood type, etc.
>This perhaps won't work in extreme cases, like an 80 year old on death's door vs. an 11 year old diagnosed with an early stage defect, but it's rarely that clear.
Maybe, but still better than "80 year old with money gets it over poor 12 year old".
Just because a system doesn't work 100% perfectly and yields to money factors, doesn't mean it's better of to replace it entirely to something money driven.
>Urgency: Jitters over the stock price of Apple is surely going to weigh Steve Jobs' transplant as more "urgent".
Urgent in the medical sense. Not in whether the patient is "more important" for his business...
If money could buy happiness, they there would be zero cases of rich people killing themselves.
Your argument is like saying a car can buy you happiness because one guy with car was able to reach hospital in case of an emergency, and was saved, while another guy, with a similar emergency died on the way, because he had no car...
>If money could buy happiness, they there would be zero cases of rich people killing themselves.
Man that analysis is just incredibly faulty. As far as you know they killed themselves months or years later than they otherwise would have. I have way more experience with suicide than I would prefer and can tell you that money troubles are a SIGNIFICANT factor for suicidal ideation and attempts [1].
[1] Wang, Y., Sareen, J., Afifi, T. O., Bolton, S. L., Johnson., E. A. (2012). Recent stressful life events and suicide attempt. Psychiatric Annals, 42.3, 101-108.
I am not saying that all cases of human suffering falls into that category, but a lot of them do.
>As far as you know they killed themselves months or years later than they otherwise would have...
That means, they tried to buy happiness, but failed to do so, right?
If so, unclear to me how such a position would play out in the real world. Please explain.
But one way a less blatantly corrupt system could "play out in the real world" is not allowing people to arbitrarily switch states when they find the organ waiting list not to their liking, or just maintaining the whole waiting list at a national level.
If you're claiming that everyone should be forced to use the same system, unless you're able to explain how that would happened and why it would be better, I'm not going to speculate on what you believe would fix the issue.
but let's make it more apples to apples, and compare against one of most wealthy humans ever, that's a tiny category on its own.
This "money can't buy happiness" is meant (or should be) somewhere along - give a man earning X dollars 2X (or 10X) instead. Short term boost of happiness will quickly fade away, and what is left? Bigger TV screen, faster car, more stupid partying or 10 bedrooms instead of 2? That's what most people do when they suddenly win/inherit large amounts of cash. Most of them end up as sad stories.
If you are not happy, more cash will not change this in 99% of the cases. Long lasting happiness doesn't come from stuff you can actually buy, or if yes they cost a tiny bit (many super intense experiences can be done with little cash, ie backpacker travelling around the world which is superior to any other way including most expensive packaged vacations, outdoor adventuring, extreme sports etc.).
(anyone able to support themselves without working could do it)
Money doesn't buy happiness directly; it buys security, and security enables happiness.
The players of the lotto and the expectations for winners are distorted. Also, we hear and remember the news stories about the flaming fall from fortune more than the person who chose the monthly payments or invested the inheritance wisely and live quietly with secure housing, adequate healthy food, and a retirement plan where they previously were behind on rent and wondering where the next meal would come from.
I know in Denmark where everything health care is run by the public sector and there is a very egalitarian access; you also have the wealthy living considerable longer than the poor.
I think lifestyle factors such as good social life, meaningful professional life matter a lot. Probably more than health care access.
One thing that I've noticed is that some men I've known (and it seems to be a male problem) don't handle the step change from a high flying career to retirement at all well. Seeing people who have worked hard to enjoy a very comfortable retirement drop dead within a year of retiring is pretty alarming!
[NB They weren't in software]
And, for example, a rich person can afford to go to the Cleveland Clinic in the U.S. (out of pocket) to get vastly better treatments that those available for the general population.
However, lots of wealthy Canadians just fly to the US to get the best care money can buy.
EX1: Sometimes your better off paying down debt or investing than buying stuff.
EX2: Sometimes your better off buying stuff for other people than yourself.
EX3: Buying experiences tends to have better returns than stuff.
EX4: Sometimes the best thing to 'buy' is time by making less money.
- fridge space for fresh ingredients that you don't have to split with roommates
- An apartment a short distance to a grocer
- pantry space for cooking tools and dry ingredients that you don't have to split with roommates
- the cooking tools themselves
- the time and mental energy to teach yourself a new skill
- money to spend on take-out when you mess up a recipe
- live near where you work
Think of all the people that commute 2+ hours in the Bay Area and the stress that goes along with that.
All things being equal, more money makes you happier than less money, with decreasing marginal effectiveness. No money always makes you miserable if you aren't being taken care of.
Circumstantially some people can need dramatically more or less money. Even if you take an average life in the US, the amount you need to comfortably live in rural Tennessee vs urban New York is enormous.
But discussions about money and happiness are not usually about the extreme cases and outliers, but about the average. When you have a case about "average life expectancy" you cannot refute it with the exceptions we know exist to the rule.
The principal still remains - on average, the poorer you are, the lower on the Maslow hierarchy you idle, and thus the less happy / healthy you are, simply because you have less fulfillment. Your hierarchy could be dramatically harder to climb, as is the case of a liver cancer patient, but we are not talking about edge cases, we are talking about the average. Once you climb that hierarchy, and have all your base needs fulfilled, and have effective financial security, having more money is not going to make you tangibly happier. IE, buying a yacht instead of renting a traditional boat is not a marked increase in happiness compared to having hot food to eat each night or waking up in the morning without worrying if you are losing your apartment today.
Edge cases are the ones that make or break people. Holding aside the argument for socialized or egalitarian healthcare, it's undeniable that major events in someone's life (major illness, accident, death, foreclosure etc...) are a primary factor for decrease in happiness. Since it's also undeniable that money can offset or augment the impact of these events - it is very relevant to take those into account.
Said another way, everyone will eventually have an "edge case" irrespective of whether it is liver cancer or otherwise. Having means to ease the troubles related to those cases, have a direct effect on how badly they are felt.
Yes. Hence the media's trend of attempting to shift blame to people who have experienced edge events by deriding them as irresponsible or whatever. It's better for the serfs to think that "money can't buy happiness" and ignore that "money can prevent or mitigate common causes of unhappiness". It's also better if the serfs remain jealous of the wealthy, but not actually knowledgeable about the vastness of their wealth. If enough people consciously hold the thought which you detailed in mind, economic revolution is inevitable, and, failing that, violent revolution is probable.
The first world has already moved on to socialized medicine precisely for this reason. Besides health expenses, the circumstantial costs of differing degrees of needs satisfaction are much less varied - they effectively just become approximated by the regional costs of food and shelter.
Luxury goods are brought up because we are talking about after base needs are fulfilled, and predicate the discussion on the basis that, one, the US is barbaric in its lack of comprehensive medical access to its people, and two, the edge cases where money can still buy you better care once you migrate away from allocating medicine based on ability to pay rather than need are extremely rare, and while still being a problem, don't predicate the whole discussion.
Basically, anyone sanely arguing for any of the socialist principals around happiness thresholds or sane taxation are starting from the presumption that negative externalities of environment like health problems out of the control of the individual need to be collectively accounted for rather than individually, and to do otherwise - as is the case with Steve Jobs liver transplant - is unethical. Primarilly because while we may have a shortage of liver transfer candidates today, the fact that demand for liver transplants comes from having wealth rather than need for replacement livers is certainly stymieing research into growing livers for transplant, as is the case with most organs needed for transplants. The capitalistic nature of medicine and the predisposition of those in need of it to have the least to pay for it contributes to why we have dozens of viagra-esque medicines with billions going into research for whatever the billionaire class might want medically while essential research in edge problems, especially chronic lifelong debilitating diseases like Parkinsons, is crippled by a lack of profit potential because the sufferers are often destitute or dying.
All those outliers and special cases factor into the average – that's the point of an average.
Jobs had a metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour. This is a still ultimately fatal but relatively indolent cancer. It sounds like your friend had a primary liver cancer, which has a more aggressive course.
Most people I know are confused between human emotions and happiness. No matter how much money you earn, you will still feel sad at the death of some whom you cared about, you will have all other myriad of human emotions any person on earth rich or poor will have to go through. And this shouldn't be confused with happiness.
Also I have a feeling that believing money can buy happiness and to a degree about the brutal fairness in the world in many occasions can destroy many people from inside.
People want to believe being mediocre is perfectly ok, they want to believe chance plays a huge role in ones life and that success and failure are always out of ones control.
I think when a lot of people say "money can't buy happiness" they are assuming survival is not a problem.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
I could spend infinite money making myself "safe" - it just depends on what you are trying to be safe from.
How much is a personal security detail and motorcade? What about on-call medical staff? A food taster? etc...
It's all totally arbitrary - nobody has determined what these physiological and safety needs are comprised of for everyone. Freegans and Preppers certainly have different definitions.
But the basic physiological requirements of having enough food, water, and shelter are not so arbitrary, though the requisite quanitity and type will of course vary.
So the idea would be in a pool of 500 recipients (arbitrary) you buy private jet time of "x miles" (an average) and/or pay out the jet time over time. Any particular purchaser would pay the average cost (not the cost for the longest jet) and also have the advantage of buying power. And you wouldn't need 500 hours (or whatever the hours you get the point) either is my guess (since some kidneys would be located within driving distance).
What do you think (as a recipient?) of that idea?
The advantage is if the jet time could cost anywhere from 0 to $10,000 (depending on multiple factors including not needing it) you pay $3000 as a hedge and are willing to take the loss if you don't need it (to help the group).
First, people who qualify for a transplant list and are not already wealthy probably cannot afford your insurance. I say this as someone who has a condition that accounts for a very high percentage of lung transplants and as someone who worked in insurance (and still writes insurance articles as a freelancer).
Second, please put your creativity towards helping people avoid needing multiple transplant lists to begin with. I find this "we are Borg, resistance is futile" stuff really horrifying. I wish a LOT more effort went into helping people like me keep their own lungs healthy rather than into heroics like better transplant operations where the doctors get good press and high self esteem and high pay and the patient is covered in scars and on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their life.
> and are not already wealthy probably cannot afford your insurance.
A product or service doesn't have to have a market with either wealthy people or people who are penniless. There are people out there, I'm sure you are aware, that could spend several thousand for this which is not the same as having to spend $100,000
> please put your creativity towards helping people avoid needing multiple transplant lists to begin with
This was just an idea that I was throwing out in a comment. It wasn't meant to imply that I planned to do the idea. It was something I thought of that I figured I would throw out there. Kind of like a request for comment. So saying "I wonder if there is a business model" is not the same as saying "I have an idea that I am thinking of pursuing or have been pursuing". I have other things which I spend my time on and I wasn't planning on spending any time on solutions to this particular problem. Just curious what others thought or thinking someone else might be interested in pursuing this. It's not my focus in business.
Health insurance in the U.S. is all kinds of messed up to begin with.
Also, if you want to defend your remark with "just tossing out ideas", hey, that's a two way street. Anyone reading your remark and thinking it sounds like a good idea is also being told by me "I am someone with a vested interested and informed opinion. If you want to help people like me, do something else. Don't do this."
> thinking it sounds like a good idea is also being told by me "I am someone with a vested interested and informed opinion. If you want to help people like me, do something else. Don't do this."
I would hope that someone who might be inclined to think that the idea (with modifications) might have merit would research a bit and not rely on 1 comment (or 10) on hacker news. [1]
[1] (Remembering the famous "why does anyone need dropbox when they can use rsync" of a few years ago...)
With transplant cost and post op care costing well into 6 figure, a $2 - $10 grand in charter jet cost should just be absorbed.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/24/liver.transplant.priori...
Decellarization to make more donor organs viable, or enable the use of pig organs. Tissue engineering to build new organs from a patient's own cells. But people spend too much time focused on what is and not enough on how they can help to make a better situation through technological progress.
Anyone can help the New Organ project, for example, as it consists of advocacy and research prizes to accelerate progress. You don't have to be a researcher to help make a difference in the matter of organ availability.
Do not disregard the importance of gratitude in determining happiness. A grateful person can be happy even in the face of death and oppression. Grateful people are the outliers that always seem to confound studies on money and happiness.
So, it would seem being one the of the richest men in the world could only buy him two more years. Two sickly years, not healthy. Kind of disappointing for rich people.
"People say, ‘Americans are living longer, so we ought to delay the age of retirement,’ but … it’s a little bit unfair to say to low-income people that they’re going to get Social Security and Medicare for fewer years because investment bankers are living longer.”"
As the divide between the rich and poor keeps growing [1], we need to start doing something about it in all areas, and this seems like a really important finding for that.
[1]http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/in-it-together-why-l...
https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2513561
So in fact doing something about the "divide between the rich and poor" is unlikely to help. It might even be counterproductive if it reduces income (which is highly correlated) and if this effect is causal.
From the results section: "inequality in life expectancy increased over time. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women in the top 5% of the income distribution, but by only 0.32 years for men and 0.04 years for women in the bottom 5% (P < .001 for the differences for both sexes)."
So I think the co-authors had a point when they talked about retirement age!
The CIs for income inequality (as well as health care factors and local labor market conditions) do not exclude zero.
https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.ht...
I expect that Delhi/Shanghai magnitude physical environment factors is also important. But luckily the US is a lot cleaner.
- circulatory issues (hypertension, due to lack of exercise),
- obesity,
- back issues,
- repetitive stress injuries, etc.
All of these could keep you from working.
Exercise and proper diet are key, regardless of your social status. The problem is that lower-status people usually don;t have the knowledge or don't care.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone fit and healthy enough to be a garbage collector from age 18 to age 70, even if they're the one driving the truck.
Or, just maybe, don't have the money or the free time.
- gym memberships start from $10/month (optional, there are plenty of body-weight exercises you can do outside of gym).
- running costs nothing (in recurring fees).
- all you need is 1 hr/day, 3-4 times a week.
It is all really about knowledge and motivation.
I am not saying it is easy, but it has nothing to do with money.
And lower income people are more likely to have jobs that require physical activity to begin with. Exercising is a lot harder if you've already been on your feet all day.
So it is not all about knowledge and motivation and while it may have little to do with money, it has a lot to do with available time.
If, for example, you're unhirable over 50 for all practical purposes, even if you can do the work until you're 70, its somewhat cruel to use that as a justification to raise the retirement age to 70.
There are stamina issues to consider. My grandmother liked knitting; in theory her retirement age should have been 85 because she was knitting until at least then when the arthritis hit too hard, but in practice she wouldn't live thru a single 12 hour shift at a textile mill, not that it matters because almost all the jobs are gone, and what very few remain would not go to an 85 year old woman. Likewise I am a pretty good software dev but I don't think I could produce under subpar conditions like an open office; its not that I can't program, its that I can't program there.
Social Security in its current formulation (not means-tested, cap on income which is taxable for it) is pretty regressive.
The Wal-Mart greet is not forced to pay into SS because of the hedge fund manager's wealth.
The fact that one person can retire early does not exacerbate the financial problems of someone else.
In such a system, the tax burden of sure porting the population is obviously minimal.
As standards of living and life expectancy improved, the proportion of people making it to pension age increased, and the pension age decreased (generally in line with expansion of social welfare programs, as well as a recognition that retirement was more of a right than a privilege for those who lasted long enough).
Is it so wrong for pension ages to creep up? Demographics certainly had. I for one expect to be working for my entire lifespan (although as a doctor this is probably easier for me than many other professions)
I've never been that well of, but at the same time I've never afforded to smoke or drink a lot. In fact nowadays I do neither. Makes you wonder how some can being poor.
I remember an instance in school, I asked my friend why he smoked or indulged in drinking. His answer was simply it was just not possible to go on with life without it. He had a myriad of relationships with girls, and dozen problems at home, he was a troubled kid and got into trouble often at school. A lot of what I understood- smoking gave him a pause from all that.
I would wonder poor people might be more prone to this sort of stuff due to the very obvious reasons. However this sort of addiction can happen due to various other reasons too. For eg read this: https://www.quora.com/Im-22-year-old-Indian-guy-and-I-need-y...
Even smart, intelligent people can be trapped into addictions of various kinds from which it can be hard to break out.
That's somewhat surprising. I wonder if the reverse holds - do rich people in poorer regions have shorter life expectancies than in richer regions?
But doesn't seem too "incredible", it's mostly the typical notion of "diminishing returns" we see everywhere.
Mere environment matters a lot.
Update: What is wrong with that? Look how rich segregate themselves and where they used to live.
Also ask any sociologist or comparative historian.
According to the original paper, life expectancy in the lowest quartile "were not significantly correlated with access to medical care, physical environmental factors, income inequality, or labor market conditions."
https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2513561
The big correlates seem to be income and behavior (e.g. smoking, obesity).
Looking at studies surrounding exercise, even simply walking 30 minutes every day leads to better quality life in terms of health including preventing cognitive decline. Exercise is also associated with preventing the shortening of telomeres which scientist believe are connected with aging.
Correlation is not causation.
I wonder how much simply controlling for parents' money and health would make this go away, although that doesn't separate effects from monetary inheritance.
Money doesn't solve all problems in life. However, nearly every problem that exists without money will be no worse with money. The reverse is not true.
A social system were everything is for money is deadly for some.
I wonder if the same conclusion can be replicated in countries with more social protections (Scandinavia for example).
- just static graphics: http://static.gapminder.org/files/vector-graphics/gapminder-...
- interactive, new data: http://www.gapminder.org/tools/bubbles#_state_marker_size%2F...
- text: http://www.gapminder.org/posters/gapminder-world-2013/
To be honest, since there is variation between countries (for Russia vs Japan it is ~20 years!) it would be really surprising if there were no variation within countries (especially as uneven economically as US).
It's well known that higher IQ correlates with greater income. I wonder if higher IQ also correlates with better health.
Even more interesting is if being around people with (on average) higher IQ, correlates with better health by osmosis of sorts, by people picking up good habits from those around them.
* Higher income -> less likelihood of lead poisoning -> higher intelligence
* Higher intelligence -> more success in job market -> higher income
* Better health as a child -> better brain development -> higher intelligence
* Higher intelligence -> more likely to exercise, eat healthy -> better health
From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology
A strong inverse correlation between early life intelligence and mortality has been shown across different populations, in different countries, and in different epochs."[3][4][5]
A study of one million Swedish men found showed "a strong link between cognitive ability and the risk of death."[6][7][8][9]
A similar study of 4,289 former US soldiers showed a similar relationship between IQ and mortality.[7][8][10]
The strong correlation between intelligence and mortality has raised questions as to how better public education could delay mortality.[11]
There is a known inverse correlation between socioeconomic position and health. A 2006 study found that controlling for IQ caused a marked reduction in this association.[12]
Research in Scotland has shown that a 15-point lower IQ meant people had a fifth less chance of seeing their 76th birthday, while those with a 30-point disadvantage were 37% less likely than those with a higher IQ to live that long.[13]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/upshot/poor-new-yorkers-te...
There are startup companies now, today, working on the first rejuvenation treatments that address one of the actual root causes of aging. Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology. Look them up, look up the senescent cell clearance methodologies they are turning from labwork to clinical treatment. These therapies will not cost very much when ready, simple mass-produced infusions.
Yet what is in the news and the thing that people pay attention to? Tiny differences in the status quo, who has a better deck chair as the ship is going down.
It is a frustrating thing to be living in the human condition.
Among the less attractive aspects of human nature are a fixation with what is rather than what can be, the tendency to limit the definition of success and desired outcomes to whatever the best of the present options might be, and a burning desire to tear down those who have more than you rather than work to create more for everyone. Even in an age of rapid, radical change driven by advancing technology, the vast majority of people focus entirely on the distribution of present assets and opportunities, giving little to no thought to the much larger set of assets and opportunities that we could create for tomorrow.
You see this in the vastly greater attention given to any evidence for distributions and correlations in life expectancy between populations today, and the tiny amount of attention and support given to the production of rejuvenation therapies to greatly increase life for everyone at a modest cost. Given the realization of SENS rejuvenation treatments, the first of which are already under development in startup companies, and most of which will take the form of comparatively low-cost, mass-produced infusions, ten year variations in longevity due to lifestyle choices or access to medicine will be swamped, made irrelevant and small.
Eat good food, get plenty of exercise, and try to relax and be gracious.
Two people have heart-attacks in middle age after eating cheeseburgers their whole lives. One of them doesn't have health-insurance, and dies, perhaps having never even received good health advice from a yearly check-up. The other is well-off, and so gets stabilized in the hospital and eventually provided with heart surgery (and a whole load of admonishments regarding lifestyle).
For an example showing that money and cultural norms are not necessarily linked, take a look at Ikaria:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-...
In terms of causation, stress can influence life expectancy, and lack of wealth can affect stress (which is especially exacerbated if a country doesn't have public healthcare). Quality of food and water can also be an issue in a society with stark inequality. That's basically as far as it goes.
Poor people can be healthier than rich people. If wealth was a dominant cause of better health then that outcome would be unlikely.
> Poor people can be healthier than rich people. If wealth was a dominant cause of better health then that outcome would be unlikely.
You're mixing possibility and probability, and the entire point is that it is unlikely.
edit: I feel like I have to be very explicit here, because this is very basic: A particular result of a comparison being unlikely to be true for any pair of individuals does not mean that if you find a single example of a comparison going the other way, you've proved something. People are very unlikely to be on an airplane at any particular time. That doesn't mean that no one is on an airplane, or that anyone anywhere being on an airplane is an uncommon event.
I'm making that extra distinction to make it clear that it's about the lifestyle, not the money per se. The perception is that wealthier people in the US have a healthier lifestyle on average than poor people in the US. However, by looking at the issue globally you can see that people who live in cultures that are healthier than the US do not necessarily have more money than the US, nor is there such a pronounced difference between the health of the richest and the health of the poorest in those healthier cultures. With that in mind, you can see that it's not the money making the difference, but rather the cultural norms. If you want to get more specific, compare the diets of the various countries with the best life expectancy, and look at the affordability to the locals for such a diet.
> "You're mixing possibility and probability, and the entire point is that it is unlikely.
edit: I feel like I have to be very explicit here, because this is very basic: A particular result of a comparison being unlikely to be true for any pair of individuals does not mean that if you find a single example of a comparison going the other way, you've proved something. People are very unlikely to be on an airplane at any particular time. That doesn't mean that no one is on an airplane, or that anyone anywhere being on an airplane is an uncommon event."
Look at what the countries with the longest life expectancy do to achieve that. Now ask yourself how much it would cost other countries to achieve similar results.
So some 40 year-olds are physically 30, and other 40 year-olds are physically 55. (going by length of telomeres, physical fitness, etc etc). So these people that die earlier have a shorted 'prime of their life' as well.