Wages and public health with J. Paul Leigh, PhD

How much you earn directly affects your chances at good health. Straightforward enough, right?

Well, sorta. J. Paul Leigh, PhD, Professor of Economics within the Public Health Division at UC-Davis, clues us in this week on how it’s actually a lot more than simple cause-and-effect.

He caught our eye recently when he published a piece with Juan Du on the effects of minimum wage on the population’s health. We chat about the health effects of wages, job satisfaction, and unemployment – and why it’s taken so long for researchers to study all this.

Particularly interesting are the outcomes of a higher wage for lower earners. If they can now buy things that are better for their health, they can also buy things that are worse for their health. So which wins out?