Martin Dribe

All over the developed world there is a SES gradient in health and mortality for adults. These
mortality differentials have also widened since the 1970s in the countries for which there are
data. Our knowledge about conditions in the more distant past is much more rudimentary, and
we do not know when and why the mortality gradient emerged. In this paper we study
differences in life expectancy at age 60 by SES, controlling for unobserved spatial and family-
of-origin heterogeneity. The analysis is based on individual-level mortality data covering the
entire population of Sweden, which have been linked to the full count censuses of 1880, 1890,
1900 and 1910 using probabilistic linking methods. Using data on occupation we measure
SES by HISCLASS. Our findings show that upper/middle class men had shorter life
expectancy than the working class, and that farmers had the longest life expectancy of all
groups. For women the mortality differentials were smaller and the pattern totally different,
with longest life expectancy for the high-status groups, and the shortest for low-status groups.
These results suggest that today’s mortality gradient by SES is of a recent origin coinciding
with the development of modern medicine and welfare society.