Economy, the Ghost in Your Gene, and the Escape from Premature Mortality

Dora Costa, Lars Olov Bygren, Benedikt Graf, Martin Karlsson and Joseph Price

CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) from Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico

Abstract: Explanations for the West’s escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors’ harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern economic growth to the escape from early death at older ages. Using a newly constructed multigenerational dataset for Sweden, we show that grandsons’ longevity was strongly linked to spatial shocks in paternal grandfathers’ yearly harvest variability when agricultural productivity was low and market integration was limited. We reason that an epigenetic mechanism is the most plausible explanation for our findings. We posit that the removal of trade barriers, improvements in transportation, and agricultural innovation reduced harvest variability. We contend that for older Swedish men (but not women) born 1830-1909 this reduction was as important as decreasing contemporaneous infectious disease rates and more important than eliminating exposure to poor harvests in-utero.

Keywords: JEL classification: I15; J11; N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-gro, nep-hea, nep-his and nep-lab
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://duepublico2.uni-due.de/servlets/MCRFileNod ... H_Series_2025_01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Economy, the Ghost in Your Gene and the Escape from Premature Mortality (2025)
Working Paper: The Economy, the Ghost in Your Gene, and the Escape from Premature Mortality (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ajt:wcinch:82948

DOI: 10.17185/duepublico/82948

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) from Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DuEPublico ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).