Written by Joyce Smith, BS. Data from 34 countries on six continents suggest that we live longer in societies that provide more support and care for one another.
Intergenerational sharing of resources is an integral part of our society and occurs publicly and within families worldwide 1. Is it possible that in today’s societies this private and public sharing of resources might support our health and survival? The willingness to share has been critically important for both our past evolutionary success and our present daily lives. Previous studies have investigated the impact of public programs on health and longevity of target populations such as our disadvantaged children and elderly. As social animals we invest in our children and share food and other resources willingly, particularly in times of need 2-4, and this sharing provides us with emotional benefits. When financial resources are used to help others (prosocial spending) 5 and when our paid taxes serve the common good, our neurological reward processing kicks in and we derive personal satisfaction in knowing our money is supporting the lives of recipients in need. There is also ample evidence that personal behavior is positively associated with subjective well-being 6. Where social relationships are stronger, longevity has been shown to be 50% higher 7 and where social isolation prevails mortality is 25% higher.
The mission of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project is to shed light as to how population growth and aging influence economic growth. NTA research teams from more than 60 countries collaboratively collect data on how we age, utilize economic resources to satisfy our current material needs, share with others and save for the future to hopefully help policymakers address the social and economic needs of growing populations. NTA members, Vogt and colleagues 8 used NTA population level data for 34 countries on six continents to measure the effect of society’s generosity. They totaled the amount of public and private transfer of material goods or money that occurs throughout lifetimes expressed relative to lifetime income and compared these transfers to national mortality rates and longevity for each country.
They found a strong linear relationship between the public and private sharing generosity of people and the average length of life in the 34 participating countries. Generosity was negatively correlated with national mortality and positively correlated with longevity. As the percentage of shared income rose, the risk of death decreased linearly. Of the 34 countries, those in Sub-Saharan Africa or South-East Asia shared the lowest percentage of their lifetime income but also had the highest risk of death (South Africa’s HIV epidemic contributed to its higher mortality). Western European countries and Japan were leaders in sharing resources and decreasing mortality. South American countries, while ranking high in generosity, share more than 60% of the average person’s lifetime income, yet their mortality levels were higher than those of Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. The generous transfer and sharing was strongly associated with life expectancy at birth even after controlling for income inequality and economic development. The nature of sharing, whether it be private such as payment for goods or services rendered or public such as public pensions or social security, or welfare regimes, appeared to have no effect on mortality .
The research team suggests that support and care for one another reduces mortality by meeting society’s urgent material needs and that the generosity of sharing may reflect the strength of social connectedness, which in and of itself, provides a human health and well-being benefit that indirectly increases longevity. The study highlighted the differing social inequalities across countries and identified vulnerable populations, which fortunately through sharing, have access to needed resources. While the study accounts only for the overall generosity of social sharing, perhaps future studies will be able to more specifically identify individual types of sharing to determine which types of wealth transfers (be it education, healthcare or pensions) are the major drivers in the social sharing -longevity association.
Source: Vogt, Tobias, Fanny Kluge, and Ronald Lee. “Intergenerational resource sharing and mortality in a global perspective.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020).
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
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Posted September 24, 2020.
Joyce Smith, BS, is a degreed laboratory technologist. She received her bachelor of arts with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Biology from the University of Saskatchewan and her internship through the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine and the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She currently resides in Bloomingdale, IL.
References:
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- Gurven M. To give and to give not: the behavioral ecology of human food transfers. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2004;27(4):543-559.
- Lee R. Sociality, selection, and survival: simulated evolution of mortality with intergenerational transfers and food sharing. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008;105(20):7124-7128.
- Hooper PL, Gurven M, Winking J, Kaplan HS. Inclusive fitness and differential productivity across the life course determine intergenerational transfers in a small-scale human society. Proceedings Biological sciences. 2015;282(1803):20142808.
- Aknin LB, Barrington-Leigh CP, Dunn EW, et al. Prosocial spending and well-being: cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2013;104(4):635-652.
- Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Med. 2010;7(7):e1000316.
- Brown SL, Brown RM. Connecting prosocial behavior to improved physical health: Contributions from the neurobiology of parenting. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews. 2015;55:1-17.
- Vogt T, Kluge F, Lee R. Intergenerational resource sharing and mortality in a global perspective. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020.
