Revisiting the “Peerage Paradox:” Persistent Inequalities in UK Life Expectancy from 1550-2025

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Frontiers in Inequality

Abstract

Health inequalities across socioeconomic lines are persistent across time and place. It is thus surprising that previous research has found that there were not mortality differences between the British peerage and general population before 1725 (Hollingsworth 1965); these results have been described in the literature as the “peerage paradox” (Fogel 1986; Harris 2004). We test whether the peerage paradox stands amidst 1) updated datasets of the British peerage and 2) updated statistical techniques in demography for capturing life expectancy differentials. Using fuzzy matching techniques and probabilistic record-linking models, we updated the original peerage dataset (Hollingsworth 1965) with a new and comprehensive catalogue of the peers (Lundy 2025) to calculate life expectancy differentials across 14 birth cohorts between the peers’ children and the general population. We find that life expectancy was higher for the peers’ children than the general population going back to the 16th century, refuting the peerage paradox. Our results support the theory of Fundamental Causes (Link and Phelan 1995), indicating that the peers have had access to resources that have enabled them to mitigate health challenges for centuries. Since the U.K. serves as an international model for class-based disparity, as well as research and policies aimed at its eradication (Mackenbach 2010), these results show that health inequalities have been even more durable than previously thought.

Authors

• Megan Whitaker, Northwestern University

• Charles Rahal, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford

• Aaron Reeves, LSE