Wealthy and Healthy

In the State of Kerala in Southern India, the life expectancy is 78 for females and 76 for males, comparable to the developed country standards. The state has the lowest child mortality rate, highest literacy (100%) etc. Yet the state lags behind others in the matter of PCI. Search "Kerala Model of Development" in the web, you will get the details.

Yeah, what that (static) graph tells me is that more than raising GDP, the best idea for long life is to not live in sub-saharan Africa (or Afghanistan).

Hans Rosling gave a TED talk about this when he introduced Gapminder. I think his conclusion was that the causality is the opposite of what you said: Countries improve their health and this causes their GDP per capita to rise. He showed a moving version of this graph where countries seemed to move up first and then rightwards. I don't know if there was any statistical analysis to go with this.

That's exactly what I was going to point out. It seems far more likely to me that keep people alive longer is good for the economy, rather than the other way around. Although I assume there's some synergy.

Longevity doesn't drive GDP levels. They do have a common cause: improvements in technology. New productivity-enhancing tech is more sensitive to the institutional setting than new health improving tech. So it is easier to transfer health technology and reap its benefits than it is to transfer productive technology. So health has improved in many places much faster than GDP. Other things equal, these improvements in health will improve productivity and GDP, but the effect will be very small if institutions are bad. In some African countries, transfer of medical technology has helped keep people around longer, but the growth rate has stuck around zero, resulting in declining per capita shares of GDP.

Is there evidence that longevity doesn't drive GDP levels? I would think (assuming decent institutions, of course) that increased longevity would be a reasonable driver of various human capital-type things that would impact GDP. Of course, rising GDP would drive innovation/technology, which would feed back into the cycle, as well.

I'm sure there's plenty of evidence. Longevity is an effect not a cause of rising levels of human capital. (People tend not to use extra years at the end of life to go to college!) Better-educated people have better diets, exercise more, etc. Increasing average lifespans logically create downward pressure on per capita GDP, because countries with longer lifespans will tend to have significantly larger populations of unproductive older people. If, say, Japan executed its citizens on their 75th birthday, average lifespan would plummet and GDP per capita would jump up. High average income correlates with high average lifespan despite the downward pressure of increasing longevity on GDP per head.

(This is supposed to be a reply to my previous comment, but disqus isn't letting me reply to it).

Actually, strike that. Very high income inequality might produce the same data (the few rich drive up average GDP, while the masses of poor drive down mean life expectancy) even if wealth is necessary *and* sufficient for health.

What I really want to see is the same graph done with medians instead of means.

What really strikes me about this is that there are several outliers in the bottom right, but virtually none in the top left. In other words, wealth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for health.

That's a fascinating chart! It contains a number of unexpected little details. Like that Vietnam is about as prosperous as India, but has considerably greater life expectancy. Or that Japan is a little less prosperous than the UK, but has better health. (Both have socialized medicine, so that is not the explanation.)

How the heck is North Korea so high? Didn't they lose like 3 million people in a famine during the 90's?