Broken Down by Work and Sex: How Our Health Declines

The literature contains many examples of the relationship between health and various measures of socioeconomic status, including income, education, and employment. There are undoubtedly multiple causal links between these variables; income and education affect health, and health affects the ability to be educated and the ability to work. There are also third factors that affect both health and socioeconomic status, and that contribute to the correlation between them. Although mortality rates are the gold standard for measuring health status, they are of limited use for investigating the way that health changes over the life cycle, or the interactions between health, work, earnings, and age among the living. Instead, we can use measures of self-reported health status, admittedly imperfect, but certainly informative. Figure 6.1 uses data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to plot self-reported health against age; a higher number means worse health, from 1 through 5, and the graph plots averages of these numbers by age. The age profiles of health for both men and women rise with age, although the rate at which health deteriorates with age diminishes sharply 6 Broken Down by Work and Sex: How Our Health Declines