At the risk of driving more old people to South Florida, I'm going to link to a New York Times article by Marginal Revolutionist Tyler Cowen. The article is about all sorts of things economists have learned in the past year, and the one Professor Mankiw pointed out and I find I'm able to relate to the most (as someone who has gone the other way) is the part about people who live in warmer climates tend to have a higher life expectancy:
Extreme cold brings cardiovascular stress as human bodies struggle to adjust to the temperature; many of the deaths in these periods come through heart attacks. Heat waves tend to kill people who were already weakened and would have died soon anyway; cold periods bring additional people to the verge of death.
When retired people move to a warmer state, their life expectancy rises dramatically. In fact, 8 to 15 percent of the increase in American life expectancy over the last 30 years comes from people moving to warmer climates.
(He also mentions that more people die in cold periods than in homicides, although I think that may not be true here in Philadelphia. ;-))
Technorati Tags: economics, New York Times, life expectancy, health, climate, South Florida, Tyler Cowen
