Curt Schilling, the MLB pitcher-turned-analyst for ESPN, was fired by the network after sharing a post on Facebook that appeared to comment on North Carolina’s law that bars transgender people from using the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity.

In a now-deleted Facebook post (captured by Out Sports) he wrote: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

Schilling also shared a a photo of a man wearing a blonde wig, a skirt and a t-shirt with holes cut in it to show his nipples. The words accompanying the image say: “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.”

The backlash to the posts was immediate, and Schilling took to his personal blog on Tuesday to defend his actions, writing, “Let’s make one thing clear right up front. If you get offended by ANYTHING in this post, that’s your fault, all yours.” He also wrote: “This latest brew ha ha is beyond hilarious. I didn’t post that ugly looking picture. I made a comment about the basic functionality of mens and womens restrooms, period.”

ESPN released a statement Wednesday announcing Schilling had been fired.

“ESPN is an inclusive company. Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated,” the statement read in its entirety.

This was not the first time Schilling had gotten into trouble on social media. Last year he was suspended by ESPN for sharing an image that made a comparison between Muslims and Nazis.

And as The New York Times adds:

“Last month, [Schilling] waded into politics on a Kansas City radio station when he suggested that Hillary Clinton ‘should be buried under a jail somewhere’ if she gave ‘classified information on hundreds if not thousands of emails on a public server, after what happened to General Petraeus.’

Last year, former CIA Director and retired Gen. David Petraeus, was accused of providing classified data to his mistress.

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When companies uproot, executives usually point to factors like lower government taxes or fewer unions.

But one gun maker, Beretta, blames something entirely different — a law passed in Maryland to try to curb mass shootings.

The company recently moved its factory to Nashville, Tenn., because it says the law in Maryland threatened its business. The opening day was celebrated with shooting demonstrations and a warm welcome from state officials.

The Italian gun maker says it’s being driven out of its longtime U.S. home on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. The political culture there has grown hostile to guns and to the people who make them, the company says.

The view couldn’t be more different in the city of Gallatin.

“They do what the people who live here really appreciate and respect and enjoy,” says Mayor Paige Brown. “And so it’s been a real pride thing for us.”

The state of Tennessee spent more than $10 million to woo Beretta. Gallatin has also thrown in a $2 million property tax break and 100 acres for free.

Gov. Bill Haslam says the plant has made him the envy of his Republican colleagues.

“I literally had the governors of Texas and Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina and I’m sure a few others walk up and go, ‘Dang, Haslam, that’s one we really wanted,’ ” he says.

That the governor would even attend the opening shows just how different the climate is for gun makers in Tennessee, says Jeff Reh of Beretta.

“Beretta USA was the second-largest private employer in Southern Maryland,” Reh says. “In the history of the state, we never had a governor visit the facility.”

A History Of Tension In Maryland

The company’s history in Maryland goes back to the late 1970s.

In the decades since then, Beretta has clashed periodically with state officials. In 2013, in response to the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, then Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley led a clampdown on ownership of high-powered weaponry.

Some proposals would have made it illegal for Beretta to import some of its own products — even for sale to the military, Reh says. The exceptions the company managed to get written into the law were not enough.

“But after that experience, we realized how close we had come to being forced out of business by the state government,” Reh says. “And that’s when we started thinking about moving the entire factory to a gun-friendly state.”

One of Beretta’s competitors, Remington, is also relocating jobs, from a plant in New York to Alabama. It also cites gun laws passed after Newtown as a reason for the move.

Beretta will spend about $45 million on the first phase of its Tennessee plant. Although the ceremonial opening was last week, the factory has operated since December.

The new plant is expected to create 300 jobs, the company says, and most workers have been hired locally. One exception is Kevin Lancto, a quality manager.

He has worked for firearm companies throughout the Northeast and taken some cold shoulders through the years.

“Even people in my own family,” Lancto says. “You know, when you know people, some people have different ideas about things.”

Lancto says even his own thinking about guns has changed. He was once an avid shooter. Now he’s more interested in the weapons’ technical aspects.

Still, Lancto says he appreciates working in a part of the country where gun making is more often a source of pride than controversy.

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Yahoo goes on sale Monday. At least some of you reading this are thinking, “Yahoo? Are they still around?”

Yes, this company founded in 1994, is ancient by Internet standards, but, according to the measurement company comScore, Yahoo sites are the third-most trafficked on the Internet. Among its properties are Yahoo Finance, News, Search, Mail, Tumblr and Flickr.

Why is Yahoo on sale? Despite having a billion monthly unique visitors — as the company claimed in its 2014 report — Yahoo just hasn’t been able to make its investors happy.

Over the last decade, six different CEOs have passed through its doors. The latest, Marissa Mayer, is a talented computer scientist who was one of Google’s earliest employees and played a crucial role in its success. But Yahoo is a puzzle that, after nearly four years, even Mayer can’t solve.

“It’s not like Yahoo doesn’t have revenue coming in, they do,” says analyst Rob Enderle. “They just don’t have enough revenue coming in to cover the costs.”

When Yahoo was founded, the Internet ad business was small and Yahoo was popular. It seemed like it could be a big player as the Internet grew up. But now, Facebook and Google have eclipsed Yahoo, with sophisticated algorithms that target the ads to the most-interested eyeballs.

Yahoo, for its part, is expected to capture more than $2.6 billion in worldwide digital ad revenues, according to eMarketer. But that’s only 1.5 percent of the online ad market. Google and Facebook control 40 percent.

Though CEO Mayer has made some high-profile content acquisitions, such as the blog site Tumblr and talent like David Pogue and Katie Couric, she and her predecessors have spent a lot of time trying to make Yahoo search better.

Yahoo may be the number three search engine in the United States, but that only amounts to less than 13 percent of the market share. Google has nearly 65 percent and Bing has the rest.

Enderle thinks Yahoo instead should have tried to be a social site more like Facebook. “Facebook is incredibly profitable,” Enderle says. “They should have focused more on making the communities their center of power than the information.”

We asked some Yahoo users what has kept them loyal to the company. Yahoo Finance, for example, has garnered praise from many people who like its tools for learning about stocks and companies.

Many of the people who responded to the NPR inquiry said they stay on certain Yahoo sites because they’ve been there for a long time.

“Yahoo itself has never been anyone’s favorite,” says Jen DeMayo, who co-founded a listserv for parents in the Washington, D.C., area with 6,500 subscribers. “It’s just sort of the platform where it started and no one’s moved it anywhere.”

There’s been debate over which companies are going to bid for Yahoo. The sale is not expected to include Yahoo’s most valuable assets, namely its share in the Chinese online retailer Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

Potential buyers of Yahoo’s other properties include Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. These companies have a way to reach people over the Internet, but ownership of Yahoo might give them a better relationship with consumers and a lot of that precious stuff called “user data” which will help them further understand tastes and demographics.

What will the sale mean for those tens of millions of people who still use Yahoo products? It’s not clear. Whoever buys Yahoo may try hard to keep its users — or not. Or it could mean the end of the Yahoo brand and with it, an era of Internet history.

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Twenty-four states are suing to block the Obama administration from implementing its new clean power regulations — the cornerstone of a promise that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming. Those rules come out of the Paris Climate Accord, which Secretary of State John Kerry plans to sign on Friday.

Texas is one of the states leading the fight against the Clean Power Plan. If you ask almost any statewide office holder they’ll tell you the plan is bad for the economy. Before Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton spoke publicly in October for example, his wife Angela introduced him with a song: “I’m a Pistol-Packin’ Mama And My Husband Sues Obama.”

These days, Paxton is facing his own legal troubles on SEC fraud charges. But when it’s him suing the federal government, it’s often over EPA regulation.

It may come as a surprise then, that energy companies here are not as unanimous in their opposition. That’s because Texas’ energy sector is transforming rapidly.

Austin, a city with a strong environmental bent, is trying to get away from coal and move toward wind solar and natural gas to reduce its carbon emissions. Gas generation produces less carbon dioxide than coal.

John Wester works for Austin Energy, the city-owned utility that runs the Sand Hill natural gas plant outside of Austin.

“Our long-term plans are to go as much toward renewables as possible, but there’s going to be natural gas for a while,” Wester says.

The move away from coal is part of meeting the city’s environmental goals. But it also follows the direction of the market. This month, even the historic coal company Peabody filed for bankruptcy. One of the causes of coal’s woes is cheap natural gas — something Texas has in abundance.

“We really see what we are promoting as a very Texas way to do this,” says Brett Kerr, a lobbyist and spokesperson for Houston-based Calpine Energy, the largest independent power producer in the country. Kerr says Calpine consumes 15 percent of the gas produced in Texas.

Last November, both Calpine and Austin Energy filed legal briefs supporting the Clean Power Plan.

“To be clear, we are not a public policy shop, and while we value environmental stewardship and that’s one of our core principals, we also think it makes a lot of business sense for us,” Kerr says.

Because Calpine is so big in natural gas, Kerr says if the Clean Power Plan reinforces the trend away from coal, that’s a huge national business opportunity for Calpine and other energy companies like it.

“The Clean Power Plan is in the best interest of Calpine,” Kerr says. “We believe it’s also in the best interest of some of these other companies.”

Then what do we make of all that pistol-packin’ rhetoric opposing the plan?

“It’s a contradiction,” says David Spence, a professor of energy regulation at UT Austin. “It seems as though political ideology is driving a lot of the positions being taken by states and state institutions … because clearly Texas will sell a lot of natural gas to a lot of power plants all over the country, who will be generating more often because of the Clean Power Plan, yet we are opposing the Clean Power Plan.”

If the plan is struck down, he says Texas and some other states will likely hold onto more coal power, but the long-term trends will stay the same. With more electricity coming from wind solar and natural gas in the future.

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President Obama is throwing his weight behind a plan that would lead to competition in the market for set-top cable and satellite TV boxes. Most viewers now rent the boxes from their TV providers. The Federal Communications Commission wants to make it easier for viewers to buy the devices.

The FCC estimates it costs subscribers $231 a year on average to rent the bulky boxes that enable them to watch cable or satellite TV. Earlier this year the agency proposed a way to make it easier for viewers to buy the boxes outright.

In essence it would require TV channels to sell their content to third-party groups, like Google and others who would sell their own devices. In an interview with Yahoo News, President Obama says a little competition is a good idea:

“The cable or satellite box is just one example of an area where because it’s been tied to the provider and you rent it and consumers spend billions of dollars on this every single year, there hasn’t been much innovation. And so the FCC is looking, independently of anything we do here at the White House, at whether it makes sense to open that up to competition.”

The president’s backing of the FCC proposal is part of a broader White House initiative to spur competition. In the Yahoo News interview, Obama compared the cable box issue to earlier moves by the government to open up the telephone system in the 1980s.

“Across the board, if we have more players who can potentially participate, fewer barriers to entry, the rules aren’t rigged, then you get more people trying to get your business and you get better products at cheaper prices,” Obama said.

The cable TV industry denounced the president’s endorsement of the FCC action. Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell now heads the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. In a blog post, he accused the White House of injecting “politics and inflammatory rhetoric into a regulatory proceeding by what is supposed to be an independent agency.”

The FCC’s final decision on the matter could come later this year.

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The farm-to-table trend has exploded recently. Across the country, menus proudly boast chickens bought from local farmers, pork from heritage breed pigs, vegetables grown from heirloom varieties. These restaurants are catering to diners who increasingly want to know where their food comes from — and that it is ethically, sustainably sourced.

But are these eateries just serving up lies?

Laura Reiley, the food critic for the Tampa Bay Times, wanted to find out. So she undertook a rigorous two-month investigation of Tampa’s farm-to-table restaurants, tracking down their sourcing claims. Many off them turned out to be bogus.

Reiley spoke with NPR’s Ari Shapiro about her investigation. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

You fact-checked dozens of these menus. You called the farms. And what did you find?

Many of those local greens misted with unicorn tears are something else entirely.

I think that there’s a powerful incentive to tell a story. We all want that story — it’s a big part of why we go out to eat. If a restaurant can give you that story about that pork chop that lived a happy and delightful life from the beginning to its very last minute, that’s great. And sometimes they’re actually serving you commodity pork.

And it’s not just that — it’s like, what claims to be Florida blue crab actually coming from India.

We did some DNA testing. It’s always illuminating when you do that. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to do that on seafood than it is on meat.

And there’s no way of testing if someone says these are organic , local heirloom tomatoes, and actually they’re Mexican tomatoes, irradiated. There are no genetic markers or tests that will tell you that.

What got me interested in this topic is I’ve done a lot of agriculture writing in the past couple of years in Florida, and met with a lot of farmers. And they’ve all groused about this a little bit. That they’re used as billboards at these restaurants. A restaurant may buy from them once or twice and then phase them out but keep them on the chalkboard or on the menu.

You talked to one pork producer who walked you through the finances of raising a hog, slaughtering it for meat. And the price of that pork chop on the plate would have been something like $40.

I think that we as Americans have really come to expect inexpensive food. We spend a very small amount of our disposable income on food and restaurateurs have to cope with that. They have to figure out how to offer food to us at a price we will pay, while buying the best ingredients that they can. And often, as in any other business, it’s buy low and sell high.

You confronted a lot of chefs about this and a lot of them gave you the same answer.

[They said:] “I guess that should come off the chalkboard.”

There were plenty of people who were honestly surprised to find something was still on the chalkboard or still on their menu many months after they’d purchased that product, and many others that were just caught red-handed.

Your reporting was all done in Tampa, but is there any reason to believe that this problem is limited to this part of Florida?

Oh, I’m sure it’s a widespread phenomenon.

And I think it is a kind of arms escalation. In some ways, it may go back to the fact that maybe 10 years ago, when we started getting real farmers markets, we as consumers started being able to buy great produce and great heritage meats and those kinds of things. So it’s almost like restaurants needed to up the ante and claim even more extravagant boutique products on their menus — things that we, as consumers, couldn’t buy ourselves. So I understand why some of these claims are being made.

So if I, as a consumer, want to dine out responsibly and want to support local agriculture without a huge carbon footprint — what should I do?

You’ve got to ask questions. I mean, I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel at a restaurant asking to see their invoices. But I think we’re going to have to move in that direction where … there’s a little more consumer activism in terms of demanding more transparency in the provenance of where we’re getting our food.

When you see those claims on the menu — naturally raised, or heritage breeds — I think that they should raise a red flag, and you should feel free to ask more questions.

Is there a way to do it without being that obnoxious kind of diner who is straight out of the Portlandia sketch?

I think price point should definitely be an indicator — if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. If you see that $10 lobster roll, something is fishy.

You’re pretty open in this article about the fact that you’ve written favorable restaurant reviews for some of these places that claimed farm-to-table philosophy and didn’t stick to it. Is this reporting in a way a mea culpa?

Absolutely. I’m embarrassed. Some of the places I’ve given the highest review in the past year and kind of swooned over their farm-to-table stuff — I feel duped.

If I went into it with the idea that I was paying a premium for a particular local food or a sustainably-raised food and I got something else, it really doesn’t matter how it tasted.

One of the things that surprised me in this article is that a lot of the chefs who really do adhere to the farm-to-table ethos don’t wear it on their sleeves.

I think there’s a lot of farm-to-table fatigue among chefs. You know, it’s like the term foodie itself. it starts to take on a kind of bankrupt, yucky demeanor after so many people have misused it.

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The leaking of more than 11 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca earlier this month cast new light on the arcane world of offshore shell companies, long a favorite hiding place for the very rich.

But actually setting up a shell corporation turns out to be something that any average Joe can do. In fact, you can do it in just a little more time than it takes to open an email account, with the help of one of the army of law firms and financial advisers that specialize in them.

“You can do it over the phone. You can do it over the Internet. It’s relatively easy to do, depending on where you are and what you want to set up,” says Tom Cardamone, managing director of Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit research group that looks for ways to stop illicit financial flows.

“It can be a matter of just a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. You can set up an anonymous shell company in Delaware the same day,” he says.

The ease with which such accounts can be established is one reason more and more money is pouring into them each year.

“A growing fraction of the world’s wealth, and particularly of the wealth in tax havens, is owned via shell companies, so it’s obviously a business that is booming and is doing extremely well,” says Gabriel Zucman, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations.

Because the industry is shrouded in secrecy, any estimates of its size are at best an educated guess, Zucman says. But he estimates that 60 percent of the money held in accounts in Swiss banks is under the names of shell corporations.

For those with money to hide, the lures of a shell corporation are many.

In most places you don’t have to attach your name to a shell corporation, making it virtually impossible for tax authorities or law enforcement officials to tell who owns it. But if you really want to cover your tracks, you can set up interlocking shell companies in different places, such as the British Virgin Islands or Bermuda, Cardamone says.

“You can create an anonymous shell in one jurisdiction that controls an anonymous trust in a completely different country that also controls a bank account in a third country,” Cardamone says.

Once your shell company is up and running, you can use it to stash any spare millions you may have lying around.

“Now you’re the owner of a company that can open, for instance, bank accounts all over the world. Or that can buy real estate all over the world. It makes it easy for you to hide your identity and to be an anonymous owner of wealth all over the world,” Zucman says.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that establishing a shell corporation — at least by itself — doesn’t technically violate any law, Cardamone says.

“There’s nothing illegal about setting up such a corporation. It’s what happens after that that can cause the problem, whether it’s tax evasion or money laundering,” he says.

In other words, it’s not having a secret shell corporation that can get you in trouble. It’s how you use it.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of firms offer help setting up shell companies, often as part of a set of financial and legal services, and many are located in the United States.

Most of these firms don’t actually process the transaction themselves but farm it out to a much larger firm that specializes in them, such as Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanian law firm is considered one of the largest such firms in the world.

With so much money pouring into these companies, big investors such as private equity firms have been eager to get a part of them. For example, the Carlyle Group was an early investor in one of the biggest firms, Hong Kong-based Offshore Incorporations Limited, but sold its share to a Scandinavian firm in 2011.

“I think they saw this as a growth industry, obviously something that particularly was experiencing strong growth from the developing world, particularly China. And it was kind of a new industry that hadn’t attracted much attention from outsiders before,” says Jason Sharman, professor of political science at Australia’s Griffith University.

As the use of shell corporations has grown, the United States and other developed countries have attempted to crack down on them. They increasingly require banks to turn over more information about accounts held by their own citizens.

As the Mossack Fonseca case has shown, major banks such as Deutsche Bank and UBS have in the past played roles in helping their clients set up offshore bank accounts.

Regulators say such efforts are making a dent in stopping tax evasion. They’ve made it much harder for many citizens of the United States and Europe to hide their money. (The rules don’t apply to people from China, Russia and Brazil, where much of the newest money comes from.)

But Zucman isn’t sure the major banks are really ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

“After all, for decades they’ve been exactly the opposite,” Zucman says. “They’ve been helping their clients evade taxes, hiding them behind shell companies, and so we can ask ourselves: Is it just enough to now ask these very same individuals and these very same institutions to now play the taxman’s job?”

“Up to this point there hasn’t been the political will to address the issue of anonymous shell companies,” Cardamone says. “These things have been in place for decades. This is not something that’s been created recently. So there’s also the issue of changing the way business has always been done. No matter what the issue is, changing something that’s been happening for decades is always difficult to do.”

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In its first-ever transparency report, Uber has revealed that it has given federal and local U.S. agencies information on more than 12 million riders and drivers between July and December 2015.

This kind of report is not uncommon in the tech industry, but this particular one does something extra: It uses the report to take regulators to task for what Uber sees as excessive data sharing, making a case that it frequently tries to narrow the scope of requested information.

During this six-month period in 2015, Uber says it shared trip data with regulatory agencies, airport authorities and law enforcement agencies. Regulators received the majority of the data, which the report says involved 11.6 million riders and 583,000 drivers. The data Uber shared with airport authorities involved 1.6 million riders and 156,000 drivers.

Uber writes in a post on Medium:

“And while this kind of trip data doesn’t include personal information, it can reveal patterns of behavior — and is more than regulators need to do their jobs. It’s why Uber frequently tries to narrow the scope of these demands, though our efforts are typically rebuffed.”

This report encapsulates Uber’s ongoing fight with regulators. In January, the California Public Utilities Commission fined Uber $7.6 million for the company’s “failure to fully and timely comply” with the commission’s reporting requirements.

Uber does not specify how many riders and drivers were affected by disclosures to law enforcement officials, but the company says the government requested data related to a total of 613 rider and driver accounts. Of those requests, Uber’s report shows it “fully” complied with 31.8 percent of the requests and produced some data for 84.8 percent of the cases.

Uber says “a large number” of law enforcement requests were related to investigations of fraud and stolen credit cards. The report does not specify how many of these cases were related to rape and sexual assault. Uber has been under scrutiny for its role in protecting passengers from these kinds of attacks.

An Uber spokesman told Fortune that the company will now be releasing a transparency report every six months. The ride-hailing service joins more than 60 companies — including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple — that regularly release such reports.

“There seems to be much more sharing of personal data for a less important purpose, which raises privacy flags for me,” Jim Harper, senior fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, tells the Verge.

In its report, Uber also specifies that the company has not been compelled by the FBI to disclose data on an issue of national security, nor has it received any court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Uber writes on Medium: “We hope our Transparency Report will lead to a public debate about the types and amounts of information regulated services should be required to provide to their regulators, and under what circumstances.”

Naomi LaChance is a business news intern at NPR.

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Al-Jazeera America, the U.S. news network backed by the ruling family of Qatar, will sign off for good after a three-hour farewell broadcast on Tuesday.

Though the media outlet struggled to gain traction in the U.S., NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik reports that it held the promise of a noncommercial approach to television news. David says that “after an earlier channel called Al-Jazeera English failed to make a dent in the U.S., Al-Jazeera America was built on the acquisition of a liberal cable network called Current.” He adds:

“The deal intended to ensure major distribution, but some cable providers resisted, saying that was a bait and switch. Al-Jazeera executives also promised the channel would not distribute its shows online, which meant that much of its content never became available digitally. Internal strife proved common and Al-Jazeera America never caught on — drawing audiences in the tens of thousands. Ultimately, the channel’s Qatari patrons pulled the plug.”

Al-Jazeera America was launched in the summer of 2013, but — as we reported in January when the network announced it would be shutting down — management problems and paltry ratings soon spelled its demise.

The network’s goal was to produce serious journalism and thorough reports, and it won several awards during its short run, including a Peabody and an Emmy. Its most well-known documentary was an expose that alleged several professional athletes used performance-enhancing drugs. Much of the evidence, however, hinged on the word of one person, Charlie Sly, a former intern at an Indianapolis clinic, who later recanted his story. The documentary was slammed by former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, one of the athletes implicated in the story, and prompted defamation lawsuits from Major League Baseball players Ryan Zimmerman and Ryan Howard.

The news organization will shut down Tuesday night following a three-hour live farewell designed to highlight the network’s three years of work. The Associated Press reports that the show begins at 6 p.m. and will be run twice before the the network goes dark.

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Poor people who reside in expensive, well-educated cities such as San Francisco tend to live longer than low-income people in less affluent places, according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records.

The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, bolsters what was already well known — the poor tend to have shorter lifespans than those with more money. But it also says that among low-income people, big disparities exist in life expectancy from place to place, said Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford University.

“There are some places where the poor are doing quite well, gaining just as much in terms of life span as the rich, but there are other places where they’re actually going in the other direction, where the poor are living shorter lives today than in they did in the past,” Chetty said, in an interview with NPR.

For example, low-income people in Birmingham, Ala., live about as long as the rich, but in Tampa, Fla., the poor have actually lost ground.

Chetty and his co-authors collected more than 1.4 billion records from the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to try to measure the relationship between income and life expectancy.

“There are vast gaps in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans,” Chetty said. “Men in the top 1 percent distribution level live about 15 years longer than men in the bottom 1 percent on the income distribution in the United States.

“To give you a sense of the magnitude, men in the bottom one percent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan.”

And where lifespans are concerned the rich are getting richer.

Since 2001, life-expectancy has increased by 2.3 years for the wealthiest 5 percent of American men and by nearly 3 percent for similarly situated women. Meanwhile, life expectancy has increased barely at all for the poorest 5 percent.

Among the study’s findings was that poor people in affluent cities such as San Francisco and New York tend to live longer than people of similar income levels in rust belt cities such as Detroit, he said.

What accounts for the disparity isn’t clear, Chetty says.

It may be that some cities such as San Francisco may be better at promoting healthier lifestyles, with smoking bans, for example, or perhaps people tend to adopt healthier habits if they live in a place where everyone else is doing it, he says.

The study suggests that the relationship between life expectancy and income is not iron-clad, and changes at the local level can make a big difference.

“What our study shows is that thinking about these issues of inequality and health and life expectancy at a local level is very fruitful, and thinking about policies that change health behaviors at a local level is likely to be important,” he says.

Chetty notes that the study has clear implications for Social Security and Medicare. The fact that poor people don’t live as long means they are paying into the system without getting the same benefits, a fact that needs to be considered in any discussion about raising the retirement age, he says.

The study was co-authored by Michael Stepner and Sarah Abraham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Benjamin Scuderi, David Culter and Augustin Bergeron of Harvard University; Shelby Lin of McKinsey and Co.; and Nicholas Turner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis.

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