Why do some people live long lives, while others die prematurely? What does the accident of birth in one place rather than another tell us about how human-designed social institutions write the rules of life and death? Why are race, class, and gender stronger social determinants of health in some places and times, and weaker in other times and places? With seed-grant support from the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public health, Jason Beckfield has launched a new project that uses comparative sociology to answer these questions.

It is by now well known that social status is strongly associated with health. Better educated, richer, and otherwise advantaged people tend to live longer and healthier lives, such that the World Health Organization, the European Union, and the United States have all elevated health disparities to the top of the policy agenda in global health.

Less well known is the fact that social status is more important to health in some places and times, and less important to health in some times and places. In other words, the rich live longer and the poor die earlier sometimes, but not always and everywhere. Why? Beckfield's recently published and in-progress collaborative research demonstrates that the institutions of Jim Crow in the United States, public health investments in developing nations, economic inequality in a global set of nations, and the depth of economic recession in the institutional context of a flexible labor market contribute to the distribution of life and death.

Currently, thanks to support from the NIH, NIA, Norface, and Harvard's Center for Population and Development Studies, Beckfield and collaborators are investigating a range of topics, including the distribution of suicide in the European Union, sickness absence as a case of moral hazard, and the sociological conceptualization of the environment in gene-environment interaction research and epigenetics. In the Fall semester of 2015, this work will feed into a new course for undergraduates at Harvard College.