Short lived equality? Intergenerational persistence of survival and SES, Sweden 1850-today

Although lifespan has increased over the past decades, the benefits have not been distributed equally. There is a major social gap in lifespan in contemporary Sweden and this gap has increased in recent decades.

Social inequality in survival is transmitted across generations in families, similarly to the intergenerational transmission of social status. Moreover, inequalities between families in SES and the length of life are likely to interact.

This project takes on the challenge to study how health and SES jointly persist across generations.Research problem and specific questions: This project documents the intergenerational accumulation of inequality in health and SES in Sweden 1850-today, over up to five generations.

There are three aims:Quantify the long-term development in family-shared survival advantage;Document how social mobility is associated with family-shared survival advantage across generations;Establish how individual health in early adulthood is related to family-shared socioeconomic status and survival advantage and individuals’ social mobility.Data and Method: The proposed project uses unique data on lifespan, SES and health from the national Swedish research infrastructure SWEDPOP to establish the accumulation of resources and survival advantage in families.

Contemporary Swedish register data (1968-today) is linked to historical population reconstructions for two Swedish regions, used to identify relatives, occupations, and lifespan, and conscript health information for men.

We analyze intergenerational similarities in health and social mobility using family scores, rank-rank correlations and quantile regressions. Societal relevance and utilization: All inequalities are conditional on being alive.

To understand the overall development of societal inequality we need to understand the extent to which one’s likelihood to live a long life persists in families, in addition to one’s likelihood to a life in prosperity.Plan for project realization: We reconstruct Swedish families 1850-today and compare ancestors (grandparents, parents) and same-generation relatives (siblings, cousins) who live in more comparable contexts as they are part of the same generation.

We also study how health in early adulthood (men’s conscript records) is related to intergenerational persistence of SES and survival.