Life Expectancy In Some Parts Of U.S. Like Developing World

by Stuart Shapiro

We are used to hearing about how life expectancies vary from country to country.  What the graph above shows for New Orleans (and others at this page do for other localities) is that they may vary dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood.  And there are important policy implications.

We need to think about the differences between adjacent neighborhoods the way we currently think about the differences between America and Haiti. To Fleming, this may mean importing strategies into U.S. cities that have worked in developing countries (like leveraging community health workers, and not just highly trained doctors). And once you start to see cities the way Fleming does, that also leads to a radical change in some of our most basic assumptions about public health.

“In public health, traditionally when we’ve thought about how we’ve allocated resources, we tend to think, ‘Well, the same amount needs to go proportionally everywhere,'” Fleming says. “We need to change that. We need to say, ‘Actually no, given these huge differences, the fairest way to allocate resources is in proportion to need’.”

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.