Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjtrowbridge | Hacker News Reader

This is an obvious third-factor for poverty and marginalization. Air pollution exposure is the most classic example of unequal protection from harm in environmental justice. Alameda county did a study on this that found as an isolated, direct-result of unequal exposure to air pollution, black people live 15 years less than white people on average in Alameda County alone.

View on HN

If you could see long term PM2.5 averages and how they vary, we'd approach as a national crisis.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266601722... (this groups methods can be substantially improved).

Having done some additional follow on work in the space -- the results definitely do not follow socioeconomic boundaries as one might expect.

Roads are a huge contributor.

Roads being a huge factor also plays into socioeconomic factors though, at least in some places. Take New York City for example, where the off-ramps for highways were purposefully planned to let traffic out in larger numbers in impoverished areas to keep the noise and pollution minimal for the more affluent burrows.

Absolutely. Though, do note that, at least in the US, road network locations change slower than gentrification changes a neighborhoods socioeconomics.

I find this very hard to believe... Mind sharing that study?

Same. I hail from a particularly polluted (compared to the rest of the EU) country, so PM2.5 over 80µg/m3 during the entire heating season, NOx constantly above 50µg/m3 in cities due to old diesels with anti-pollution devices turned off or removed entirely and the overall effect is said to be a 3-6 years shorter life expectancy.

It checks out compared to countries without these issues, so 15 years to me sounds exaggerated, especially if we're talking about areas close to each other.

Such a huge shortening normally involves heavy metal pollution of the drinking water and soil.

Yeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems).

It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?

There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:

"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...

It's not surprising that poverty affects life expectancy but what I find hard to believe is that poor air quality shortens life expectancy by a full 15 years.

From a quick google search I'm guessing this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097628/

That sounds incredibly obvious on the face of it though ?

Having the study at hand is nice of course, but environnemental factors being alleviated through money and discriminatory policies is rampant enough I don't get the surprise.

People using high quality water filters or straight buy clean water tanks in areas where tap water is bad, getting better indoor air filtering, blocking construction of pollution sources to move them further away (near poorer areas) in the county, redlining/manipulateing zoning rules to make it systematic etc.

It's a old as humans.

15 years disparity in life expectancy exclusively attributed to air quality is not incredibly obvious. To put this in perspective, nationwide average disparity in life expectancy is 5 years between Black and white people. Triple that amount, exclusively attributed to air quality, is a substantial claim.

Exactly. Even smoking doesn't shorten life expectancy by that much (it's 10 years).

Smoking is voluntary, partly self-adjusting (willingly or not you'll reduce smoking as you get worse), composition is regulated and that habit only starts at a later stage in life.

None of that applies to PM2.5 kind of pollution.

For an area that has well known air pollution issues it doesn't sound far-fetched.

Comparing to the national average helps put it into perspective but doesn't make sense as sanity check. Flynt could be a better data point.

Literally the poor people in London lived in the East End because it was downwind.

London has one-way wind?

Prevailing wind directions are common though? Coriolis effect and earth rotation and continuously moving energy source in the sky and all that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds

That's why we learned to look at on wich side of the trees the moss grows to find the compass directions.

Yes. Marine environment: the wind blows largely off the Atlantic, across the whole UK.

Yeah, that tracks with a lot of the environmental justice research

On the other hand life expectancy of richest people in US is on par with poorest in EU. (Poverty is still factor within those regions).

This is simply not true, at least if you consider all of Europe.

Not sure what "all of Europe" are you talking about when I was talking about EU.

Even if you average across the whole EU, this is not true. Western and Northern EU countries are the exception to the rule.

I don't believe this, show me your stats. The poorest region is Bulgaria, with life expectancy of 75. Just looking at the American Congress (which isn't even composed of the richest people), few people there die at mere 75 years of age.

Also, here in the EU, life expectancy varies a lot. Interestingly, not-so-rich countries such as Italy and Spain win over richer Austria, Germany and Denmark by a year or so.

Diet is most likely a big factor. Despite being less rich, Italy and Spain have decent healthcare systems, and traditionally Mediterranean diets tend to include more vegetables and less saturated fats than cuisines in those Northern countries, and even poor people have access to those healthy options.

I was wrong about EU in general. It was about poorest in western Europe.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap

...in one single cohort-based study that only looked at around 10K deaths between the United States and 16 European countries, not the EU or all of Europe.

Life expectancy in the EU varies a lot by country. Someone born in Sweden has a life expectancy over ten years longer than someone born in Latvia.

That one study feels like a paper that was engineered to make headlines and social media sound bites, not to be an accurate look at the entire population.

Do you think your comment has more value than one study?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com