Changes in the Age Distribution of Mortality over the Twentieth Century
Open accessAbstract
Mortality rates declined extremely rapidly in the United States over the twentieth century, as they did in all developed countries. This change has been accompanied by several important epidemiological trends. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, infectious diseases were the leading cause of death. This chapter does not quantify the role of medicine, income, social programs, and other factors in improved mortality in the last half century, but shows examples where each is important as a first step in this research process. It first presents the basic facts about changes in the age distribution of mortality change and life expectancy improvements, highlighting the growing role of mortality reductions among the elderly. It then examines why this trend has occurred, discussing in particular the epidemiology of mortality reduction at different points in time and for different causes.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Medicare grew and treatment and prevention of life-threatening chronic diseases, especially heart disease, improved from 1971 to 1985.
“the period 1971 to 1985 saw the growth of Medicare and improvement in the treatment and prevention of life-threatening chronic diseases, especially heart disease.”
From Social security and mortality: The role of income support policies and population health in the United States (2011) · cites this paper as [35]
Section 9.4 (page not supplied) describes advances in treating and preventing heart disease and a sustained decline in cardiovascular mortality beginning in the mid-1960s. The paper also says Medicare likely improved elderly access to care, but the passages do not establish that Medicare grew specifically from 1971 to 1985. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredSmoking decline and the civil rights movement had salutary population health effects beginning in the 1960s.
“Similarly, both the decline in smoking rates and the civil rights movement have been shown to have had salutary impacts on population health beginning in the 1960s.”
From Social security and mortality: The role of income support policies and population health in the United States (2011) · cites this paper as [35]
Section 9.4 identifies reduced smoking after 1960 as an important behavioral change associated with better health. Section 9.5.3 reports evidence suggesting that the Civil Rights Act, together with Medicaid expansion, improved access to care and health outcomes for the poor. It does not establish a separate population-wide health effect of the civil rights movement; the paper also cautions that multiple factors affected racial differences in infant mortality. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredAntibiotic use for infectious disease emerged and grew in clinical medicine from 1940 to 1955.
“Specifically the period from 1940 to 1955 was also one in which the use of antibiotics in the treatment of infectious disease emerged and grew in clinical medicine”
From Social security and mortality: The role of income support policies and population health in the United States (2011) · cites this paper as [35]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 14
- Berkman, Lisa, and Ichiro Kawachi, eds. 2000. Social epidemiology. New York: Ox- ford University Press.
- Cutler, David, Edward Glaeser, and Karen Norberg. 2001. Explaining the rise in youth suicide. In Risky behavior among youths, ed. Jonathan Gruber, 219-69. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Cutler, David, and Ellen Meara. 2000. The technology of birth: Is it worth it? In Frontiers in health policy research, Vol. 3, ed. Alan Garber, 33-67. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Deaton, Angus. 2001. Relative deprivation, inequality, and mortality. NBER Working Paper no. 8099. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Re- search, January.
- Fogel, Robert W. 1994. Economic growth, population theory, and physiology: The bearing of long-term processes on the making of economic policy. American Economic Review (84): 369-95.
- Lee, Ronald, and Lawrence Carter. 1992. Modeling and forecasting U.S. mortality. Journal of the American Statistical Association 87 (419): 659-71.
- Marmot, Michael, M. Kogevinas, and M. A. Elston. 1987. Social/economic status and disease. Annual Review of Public Health 8:111-35.
- Marmot, Michael, M. J. Shipley, and G. Rose. 1984. Inequalities in death-specific explanations of a general pattern? Lancet 1 (8384): 1003-06. 364
- David M. Cutler and Ellen Meara Marmot, Michael, G. D. Smith, S. Stansfeld, C. Patel, F. North, J. Head, I. White, E. Brunner, and A. Feeney. 1991. Health inequalities among British civil ser- vants: The Whitehall II Study. Lancet 337 (8754): 1387-93.
- McDermott, Walsh. 1978. Medicine: The public good and one's own. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 21 (2): 167-87.
- McKeown, Thomas. 1976. The modern rise of population. New York: Academic Press.
- Mellor, Jennifer, and Jeffrey Milyo. 2001. Income inequality and health. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 20 (1): 151-55.
- Menchik, Paul L. 1993. Economic status as a determinant of mortality among black and white older men: Does poverty kill? Population Studies 47 (3): 427-36.
- Wilkinson, Richard. 1996. Unhealthy societies. London: Routledge.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Willoughby, T., Heffer, T., Good, M., & Magnacca, C. (2021) · Developmental Review · doi:10.1016/j.dr.2021.100980 · Cited by 115 · see citing works
Arno, P. S., House, J. S., Viola, D., & Schechter, C. (2011) · Journal of Public Health Policy · doi:10.1057/jphp.2011.2 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
- Authors
- Cutler, D. M., & Meara, E.
- Venue
- Perspectives on the Economics of Aging
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2004
- Pages
- 333-366
- OpenAlex
- W3126104705
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 13.44
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.nber.org
- Locations
- University of Chicago Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Demography › Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Healthcare Systems and Public Health
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Historical and modern epidemiology studies
- Keywords
- age distribution of deaths, mortality decline, life expectancy, elderly mortality, infectious disease mortality, causes of death
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
