I guess this goes into the unsurprising category, but a new study shows that the risk of premature death plummets as you wander up the educational ladder. To make a meta-point, I post on these sorts of socio-health studies frequently for a reason: We tend to think of inequality in terms of some people having more stuff than other people. That's true, to an extent. But the poor in our society are also sicker, in more everyday pain, and have a greater chance of dying young. We're comfortable with inequality of stuff, but are we really very comfortable ignoring such gross inequality of pain, of illness, and of death? That's not to suggest that we'll ever have a society where everyone feels the same amount of pain, but it is to argue that the poor are not just different because they have less money, but because their lives are substantially worse, and worse in ways that better social policy could help alleviate.
