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Column Centimetres

with Olav Muurlink

Iwas surprised to hear that Queensland’s life expectancy is solidly the lowest in the nation…if you don’t count the Northern Territory. But perhaps there is no surprise that Canberra tops the lot, with the life expectancy of a man in Canberra being 7 years higher than that in the ‘other territory’, The Territory. For a woman, the gap between top (Canberra) and bottom (the NT) is 5.3. In both cases, the gap is growing. Women continue to outlive men , a little over 4 years. And indigenous Australians have the lowest life expectancy of all. But today, I want to focus on Canberra, because the Canberra results, all joking aside, point to a paradox that also exists inside the men v women gap.

They say power corrupts, and while that may be true, the data also show that power ‘preserves’. Actuarial statistics tend to show that the higher up the power structure you go, the longer you tend to live…. I remember in particular a British civil servant study, because you know the British are absolutely fabulous bureaucrats, and have been keeping records of who does what for centuries. The higher you climb up the tree of power, the more hours you work, and the more responsibility is heaped onto your shoulders. The higher they climb, the further they fall…? No. The higher they climbed, the longer bureaucrats lived.

One of the few specialisations I can really lay claim to as an academic is what is called “working time”, and I remember reading the work of one of the great masters of work and stress, Professor Cary Cooper (you

Editor: Olav Muurlink editor@thedailyjournal.ink

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A little bit of legals in not-too-fine print

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And yet, the average politician does not live less long than the average person. So for example, a US study found that the winners of a particular set of elections (for governor) lived 5 years longer than candidates who lost. Another study that looked at the science of ‘close ones’— those elections that were won or lost on a knife-edge, found that the winners lived longer than the losers. What’s going on is that power is a preservative: control over your circumstances, even if it is illusory, is good for you. Just as feeling that one is not the master or mistress of one’s own destiny is, literally, deadly.

Which makes the male v women gap particularly interesting, considering that men hold roles of greater ‘power’ in society, and, in the ‘traditional family’…well, they wore/wear the pants. The reason for that difference seems to be less about what’s going on in our minds, and more about what’s going on in our hormone systems. Estrogen seems to be a good hormone, and testosterone leads to…well you only have to look at teenage boys to know what that leads to.

Olav

Muurlink is associate professor in sustainable innovation and consulting editor at the Small Newspaper Company.