Abstract
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, industrialized countries saw their urban mortality fall and the end to the rural-urban mortality differentials, once vastly favourable to rural areas. This process can be linked with two broad phenomena: a rise in income and improved sanitation. Here we focus on income and take advantage of the unusual quantity, quality, and variety of statistics computed by the statistical department of the Paris municipality from 1880 to 1914. The difference between the best and worst neighbourhoods (quartiers) in Paris in life expectancy is over 10 years in life expectancy. To explain such huge mortality differentials between neighbourhoods, we add information on income and wealth from fiscal records, the distribution on rental values for each neighbourhood. We document that the disparities in mortality between neighbourhoods were strongly related these income indicators. Over time, mortality fell partly because income increases and partly because of a change of the mortality income relationship.
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Notes
- 1.
“As there are two different forms of affluence, the one that don’t produces anything, and the one that produces, and as industry knows how to share that one in order to increase it, I wanted to understand if they both positively influence the length of life.”
- 2.
Since the French Revolution, population censuses were performed every 5 years; they have been kept in the archives from 1831 on in most cases. Here we use data on censuses from 1881, 1886, 1891 and so on.
- 3.
The quartiershave a population of at least 10,000 and with these six age categories the number of empty cells is essentially zero.
- 4.
Life expectancy by départements are taken from (Bonneuil 1997).
- 5.
Both the share of poor and the share of rich are standardized and thus the coefficients can be directly expressed as variations in life expectancy, the constant measuring the life expectancy at the average value of the share of poor/rich.
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Kesztenbaum, L., Rosenthal, JL. (2016). The Democratization of Longevity: How the Poor Became Old in Paris, 1880–1913. In: Ramiro Fariñas, D., Oris, M. (eds) New Approaches to Death in Cities during the Health Transition. International Studies in Population, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43002-7_8
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