b'AGING IN THE 21ST CENTURYCompound Disadvantage Life expectancy in the US varies widely The US has large and enduring racial healthdepending on things like education, income, race disparities. For example, Sloan et al. (2010) findand residential characteristics. Improving the a 17% higher mortality rate for Blacks comparedoutlook will certainly involve further improve-to Whites in the HRSa mortality gap theyments to behavioral factors like diet, smoking and show is also present and of similar degree at thephysical activity. Yet health is also powerfully de-beginning of the 20th century. To facilitate thetermined by social and environmental conditions. study of racial differences, the HRS has alwaysThese and other factors directly affect our health oversampled Black and Hispanic households atand are topics in need of further research. As about a rate of two-to-one compared to Whitemore data become available from other HRS sister households, with a significant supplementalstudies, the opportunities will grow, especially recruitment effort in 2010. There are clearlyto compare developed and developing countries important health benefits of higher SES in(Weir et al. 2014).adulthood associated with cleaner, safer, more affluent neighborhoods, and of early childhood health and socioeconomic conditions. While some of the foregoing studies explicitly investigate racial differences, race is typically considered an important risk that needs to be accounted for. Nearly all of the studies discussed in thisBlack Americans experience disadvantage section find that Black Americans experiencein adult socioeconomic status, neighborhood compound disadvantage, that is, disadvantage incontext, and childhood health and adult SES, neighborhood context, and childhoodsocioeconomic conditions.health and socioeconomic conditions. As noted, cross-national comparisons of health often limit the analysis to non-Hispanic whites to rule out this significant source of variation between the US and other countries. The mechanism by which racial differences come about is a major topic for future research.82'