> Life expectancy was inversely related to levels of rurality. In 2005-2009, those in large metropolitan areas had a life expectancy of 79.1 years, compared with 76.9 years in small urban towns and 76.7 years in rural areas. When stratified by gender, race, and income, life expectancy ranged from 67.7 years among poor black men in nonmetropolitan areas to 89.6 among poor Asian/Pacific Islander women in metropolitan areas. Rural-urban disparities widened over time. In 1969-1971, life expectancy was 0.4 years longer in metropolitan than in nonmetropolitan areas (70.9 vs 70.5 years). By 2005-2009, the life expectancy difference had increased to 2.0 years (78.8 vs 76.8 years). The rural poor and rural blacks currently experience survival probabilities that urban rich and urban whites enjoyed 4 decades earlier. Causes of death contributing most to the increasing rural-urban disparity and lower life expectancy in rural areas include heart disease, unintentional injuries, COPD, lung cancer, stroke, suicide, and diabetes.
Very, very confounded correlations study. Given the greater prevalence of schizophrenia in urban dwellers and the negative effects of air pollution we have pretty strong reasons to suspect urban living is less healthy than rural living. But in a modern economy the highly educated and high socioeconomic status people who are disproportionately healthy will almost all live in urban areas.
Correlational studies are only ever suggestive.
All of these are due to behaviour, not environment.
> Causes of death contributing most to the increasing rural-urban disparity and lower life expectancy in rural areas include heart disease
Diet
> unintentional injuries
Working on a farm is ludicrously dangerous
> COPD, lung cancer
Rural people are poorer and poorer people smoke nope
These days it is but back before the revolutions in public health at the turn of the 20th century cities were very unhealthy, so much so that they tended to be net consumers of population from the countryside even when they weren't growing.
Don't forget unions. We like to bag on them but factories with locked doors burning down with the people still inside gave the unions the teeth they needed to get things like that made illegal.
>>> Life expectancy has been increasing as people left the countryside for the cities.
It's a comment on the causation here - if 'moving to cities' caused an increase in life expectancy in general you'd expect people living in cities to always have higher life expectancy than people in the countryside, and that's what my comment was refuting. Instead, it seems that life expectancy has been rising at the same time as people have been moving to cities, but moving to cities is not what caused the general life expectancy changes.
EDIT: Also, people have been moving to cities for millenia, it's just only been the past few centuries where those cities stopped being massive deathtraps and thus actually started growing.
Moving to current cities may still be what's causing life expectancy to increase, even if moving to cities in the past didn't. Cities weren't held constant.
Of course! But I'd still guess that it's not some intrinsic property of cities, and that a large part of the difference would be explained by income differentials (or job differences - no chance of getting crushed by a tractor in Times Square).
