For decades, educational inequalities in mortality have widened and mortality among the least educated has stalled, even as overall mortality has improved, and an increasing proportion of young people have completed secondary and tertiary education. While researchers recognize that these trends are in part related to changing selection into education groups, there has been no unifying framework for understanding why the trends may be related. This article provides a unifying framework by introducing a concept called the “convex inequality regime,” a diminishing returns relationship between relative education and mortality. In populations where convex inequality regimes prevail, even without any changes in the institutions governing inequality or any changes in overall mortality conditions, education transitions result in an increase in mortality for the less educated and an increase in mortality inequality between education groups. The model also shows that lifespan variation increases for lower education groups because convex inequality regimes tend to increase relative mortality more rapidly at younger ages during an education transition. Even after an education transition is complete, inequality between education groups will continue to increase for decades due to the momentum of inequality, a cohort replacement phenomenon where younger more unequal cohorts replace older more equal cohorts.

中文翻译：

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不平等有动力吗？凸不平等制度对死亡率动态的影响


几十年来，死亡率方面的教育不平等现象不断扩大，尽管总体死亡率有所下降，而且越来越多的年轻人完成了中等和高等教育，但受教育程度最低的人群的死亡率却停滞不前。尽管研究人员认识到这些趋势在一定程度上与教育群体选择的变化有关，但目前还没有统一的框架来理解这些趋势为何可能相关。本文通过引入一个称为“凸不平等制度”的概念（相对教育与死亡率之间的收益递减关系）提供了一个统一的框架。在凸性不平等制度盛行的人群中，即使管理不平等的机构没有任何变化，总体死亡率状况没有任何变化，教育转型也会导致受教育程度较低者的死亡率上升，以及教育群体之间死亡率不平等的加剧。该模型还表明，受教育程度较低的群体的寿命差异会增加，因为在教育转型期间，凸不平等制度往往会更快地增加较年轻的相对死亡率。即使在教育转型完成后，由于不平等的势头，教育群体之间的不平等将在几十年内继续加剧，这是一种群体更替现象，即更年轻、更不平等的群体取代更年长、更平等的群体。