Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Biographic Data
| ID | 248941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Wrigley-Field |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Wrigley-Field |
| SIGNATURE | WRIGLEY-FIELD E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3489-4279 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Diverging Mortality Trends by Educational Attainment in the US
This cross-sectional study examines trends in US mortality rates by sex and educational attainment before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the Covid-19 Pandemic
This cohort study examines trends in excess deaths in the US before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
How Ethnoracial Groups Spend Their Time
We know strikingly little about how time use varies across ethnoracial groups in the United States. We describe the daily lives of 210,586 White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people in the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (2003-2019). Activities are similarly unpleasant for all groups, but White people spend the most time on highly pleasant leisure activities, Asian people spend the most time in unpleasant ways, and Black people s…
Three Ways of Looking at Black-White Mortality Differences in the United States
Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review argues that there are three main strategies for doing so, falling on a spectrum of more conventional (though with many novel variants) to unexpected. Distributional approaches quantify population death rates or lifespans, and there is a proliferation of…
Is Covid-19 Mortality “Like the Flu”? A Cumulative Death Rates Comparison
Jessie Himmelstern and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field on a misleading benchmark
Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan
Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery's and Jim Crow's long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an independent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area-level relationships between Blac…
Racial Inequality in the Prime of Life: Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1906–1933
In the first half of the twentieth century, deaths from infectious disease, especially among the very young, fell dramatically in American cities. However, as infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose, racial inequality in urban infectious disease mortality grew. In this paper, we show that the fall in mortality and the rise in racial inequality in mortality reflected two countervailing processes. The dramatic decline in infant mortality fro…
Examining Excess Mortality Among Critical Workers in Minnesota During 2020–2021: An Occupational Analysis
Objectives. To understand the occupational risk associated with COVID-19 among civilian critical workers (aged 16–65 years) in Minnesota. Methods. We estimated excess mortality in 2020 to 2021 for critical occupations in different racial groups and vaccine rollout phases using death certificates and occupational employment rates for 2017 to 2021. Results. Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic was higher for workers in critical occupations…
A First Look: Disparities in Covid-19 Mortality Among US-Born and Foreign-Born Minnesota Residents
In a Stationary Population, the Average Lifespan of the Living Is a Length-Biased Life Expectancy
What is the average lifespan in a stationary population viewed at a single moment in time? Even though periods and cohorts are identical in a stationary population, we show that the answer to this question is not life expectancy but a length-biased version of life expectancy. That is, the distribution of lifespans of the people alive at a single moment is a self-weighted distribution of cohort lifespans, such that longer lifespans have proportion…
Racial Disparities in Mortality During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in United States Cities
Against a backdrop of extreme racial health inequality, the 1918 influenza pandemic resulted in a striking reduction of non-White to White influenza and pneumonia mortality disparities in United States cities. We provide the most complete account to date of these reduced racial disparities, showing that they were unexpectedly uniform across cities. Linking data from multiple sources, we then examine potential explanations for this finding, includ…
Race-Specific, State-Specific Covid-19 Vaccination Rates Adjusted for Age
The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Blac…
How do populations aggregate
BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between populations at different scales plays an important role in many demographic analyses. OBJECTIVE: We show that when a population can be partitioned into subgroups, the death rate for the entire population can be written as the weighted harmonic mean of the death rates in each subgroup, where the weights are given by the numbers of deaths in each subgroup. This decomposition can be generalized to o…
Life Years Lost to Police Encounters in the United States
How much life in the United States is lost to encounters with the police? The author builds on a demographic life table model by Edwards, Lee, and Esposito to estimate, for race- and gender-specific populations, how many years of life are lost in two categories of police encounters: (1) encounters involving officer use of force and (2) all deaths involving police encounters. Average life years lost by individuals who are killed ranges from 39 yea…
Multidimensional Mortality Selection: Why Individual Dimensions of Frailty Don’t Act Like Frailty
Theoretical models of mortality selection have great utility in explaining otherwise puzzling phenomena. The most famous example may be the Black-White mortality crossover: at old ages, Blacks outlive Whites, presumably because few frail Blacks survive to old ages while some frail Whites do. Yet theoretical models of unidimensional heterogeneity, or frailty, do not speak to the most common empirical situation for mortality researchers: the case i…
Racial Disparities in Covid-19 and Excess Mortality in Minnesota
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has produced vastly disproportionate deaths for communities of color in the United States. Minnesota seemingly stands out as an exception to this national pattern, with white Minnesotans accounting for 80 percent of the population and 82 percent of COVID-19 deaths. The authors examine confirmed COVID-19 mortality alongside deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic-'excess mortality'-in Minneso…
Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900–1948
In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the United States. We use data on infectious disease deaths from all reporting U.S. cities to describe regional patterns in the decline of urban infectious mortality fr…
Mortality Deceleration and Mortality Selection: Three Unexpected Implications of a Simple Model
Unobserved heterogeneity in mortality risk is pervasive and consequential. Mortality deceleration—the slowing of mortality’s rise with age—has been considered an important window into heterogeneity that otherwise might be impossible to explore. In this article, I argue that deceleration patterns may reveal surprisingly little about the heterogeneity that putatively produces them. I show that even in a very simple model—one that is composed of jus…
What to Read Now
What to Read Now Inthis new series ,WLTasks distinguished authors torecommend books about specific subjects within their area of expertise. In thisinstallment , we've asked Iraqiwriter Weam Namou tooffer three books towhich readers should turn fora better understanding ofIraqtoday. From the Mosul-based blogs ofa modern-day Anne Frank tothe memoirs andpoetry ofwriters living inexile , Namou s choices go beyond one-dimensional media images todelve …
Hippocratic Hypocricy in the War on Terror
Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House, 2006), 240 pages, hardcover $23.95.When he saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, medical ethicist and practicing physician Steven Miles immediately wondered: Where were the doctors, nurses, and medics while these abuses were happening?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Clic…
Rebellion of a New Generation
Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow, eds., with preface by Bernardine Dohrn, Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 256 pages, paperback $14.95.One frequently comes across handwringing articles in the mainstream media decrying the supposed apathy of my generation. Too often these are written by older liberals, nostalgic for their own bygone days of protest (and forgetful of the years of smal…
Racial Disparities in Covid-19 and Excess Mortality in Minnesota
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has produced vastly disproportionate deaths for communities of color in the United States. Minnesota seemingly stands out as an exception to this national pattern, with white Minnesotans accounting for 80 percent of the population and 82 percent of COVID-19 deaths. The authors examine confirmed COVID-19 mortality alongside deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic-'excess mortality'-in Minneso…
Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900–1948
In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the United States. We use data on infectious disease deaths from all reporting U.S. cities to describe regional patterns in the decline of urban infectious mortality fr…
Mortality Deceleration and Mortality Selection: Three Unexpected Implications of a Simple Model
Unobserved heterogeneity in mortality risk is pervasive and consequential. Mortality deceleration—the slowing of mortality’s rise with age—has been considered an important window into heterogeneity that otherwise might be impossible to explore. In this article, I argue that deceleration patterns may reveal surprisingly little about the heterogeneity that putatively produces them. I show that even in a very simple model—one that is composed of jus…
A First Look: Disparities in Covid-19 Mortality Among US-Born and Foreign-Born Minnesota Residents
Racial Disparities in Mortality During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in United States Cities
Against a backdrop of extreme racial health inequality, the 1918 influenza pandemic resulted in a striking reduction of non-White to White influenza and pneumonia mortality disparities in United States cities. We provide the most complete account to date of these reduced racial disparities, showing that they were unexpectedly uniform across cities. Linking data from multiple sources, we then examine potential explanations for this finding, includ…
How do populations aggregate
BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between populations at different scales plays an important role in many demographic analyses. OBJECTIVE: We show that when a population can be partitioned into subgroups, the death rate for the entire population can be written as the weighted harmonic mean of the death rates in each subgroup, where the weights are given by the numbers of deaths in each subgroup. This decomposition can be generalized to o…
Racial Inequality in the Prime of Life: Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1906–1933
In the first half of the twentieth century, deaths from infectious disease, especially among the very young, fell dramatically in American cities. However, as infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose, racial inequality in urban infectious disease mortality grew. In this paper, we show that the fall in mortality and the rise in racial inequality in mortality reflected two countervailing processes. The dramatic decline in infant mortality fro…
How Ethnoracial Groups Spend Their Time
We know strikingly little about how time use varies across ethnoracial groups in the United States. We describe the daily lives of 210,586 White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people in the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (2003-2019). Activities are similarly unpleasant for all groups, but White people spend the most time on highly pleasant leisure activities, Asian people spend the most time in unpleasant ways, and Black people s…
Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan
Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery's and Jim Crow's long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an independent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area-level relationships between Blac…
Examining Excess Mortality Among Critical Workers in Minnesota During 2020–2021: An Occupational Analysis
Objectives. To understand the occupational risk associated with COVID-19 among civilian critical workers (aged 16–65 years) in Minnesota. Methods. We estimated excess mortality in 2020 to 2021 for critical occupations in different racial groups and vaccine rollout phases using death certificates and occupational employment rates for 2017 to 2021. Results. Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic was higher for workers in critical occupations…
In a Stationary Population, the Average Lifespan of the Living Is a Length-Biased Life Expectancy
What is the average lifespan in a stationary population viewed at a single moment in time? Even though periods and cohorts are identical in a stationary population, we show that the answer to this question is not life expectancy but a length-biased version of life expectancy. That is, the distribution of lifespans of the people alive at a single moment is a self-weighted distribution of cohort lifespans, such that longer lifespans have proportion…
Race-Specific, State-Specific Covid-19 Vaccination Rates Adjusted for Age
The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Blac…
Life Years Lost to Police Encounters in the United States
How much life in the United States is lost to encounters with the police? The author builds on a demographic life table model by Edwards, Lee, and Esposito to estimate, for race- and gender-specific populations, how many years of life are lost in two categories of police encounters: (1) encounters involving officer use of force and (2) all deaths involving police encounters. Average life years lost by individuals who are killed ranges from 39 yea…
Multidimensional Mortality Selection: Why Individual Dimensions of Frailty Don’t Act Like Frailty
Theoretical models of mortality selection have great utility in explaining otherwise puzzling phenomena. The most famous example may be the Black-White mortality crossover: at old ages, Blacks outlive Whites, presumably because few frail Blacks survive to old ages while some frail Whites do. Yet theoretical models of unidimensional heterogeneity, or frailty, do not speak to the most common empirical situation for mortality researchers: the case i…
Rebellion of a New Generation
Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow, eds., with preface by Bernardine Dohrn, Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 256 pages, paperback $14.95.One frequently comes across handwringing articles in the mainstream media decrying the supposed apathy of my generation. Too often these are written by older liberals, nostalgic for their own bygone days of protest (and forgetful of the years of smal…
Hippocratic Hypocricy in the War on Terror
Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House, 2006), 240 pages, hardcover $23.95.When he saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, medical ethicist and practicing physician Steven Miles immediately wondered: Where were the doctors, nurses, and medics while these abuses were happening?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Clic…
What to Read Now
What to Read Now Inthis new series ,WLTasks distinguished authors torecommend books about specific subjects within their area of expertise. In thisinstallment , we've asked Iraqiwriter Weam Namou tooffer three books towhich readers should turn fora better understanding ofIraqtoday. From the Mosul-based blogs ofa modern-day Anne Frank tothe memoirs andpoetry ofwriters living inexile , Namou s choices go beyond one-dimensional media images todelve …
Mortality Deceleration and Mortality Selection: Three Unexpected Implications of a Simple Model
Unobserved heterogeneity in mortality risk is pervasive and consequential. Mortality deceleration—the slowing of mortality’s rise with age—has been considered an important window into heterogeneity that otherwise might be impossible to explore. In this article, I argue that deceleration patterns may reveal surprisingly little about the heterogeneity that putatively produces them. I show that even in a very simple model—one that is composed of jus…
Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900–1948
In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the United States. We use data on infectious disease deaths from all reporting U.S. cities to describe regional patterns in the decline of urban infectious mortality fr…
Life Years Lost to Police Encounters in the United States
How much life in the United States is lost to encounters with the police? The author builds on a demographic life table model by Edwards, Lee, and Esposito to estimate, for race- and gender-specific populations, how many years of life are lost in two categories of police encounters: (1) encounters involving officer use of force and (2) all deaths involving police encounters. Average life years lost by individuals who are killed ranges from 39 yea…
Multidimensional Mortality Selection: Why Individual Dimensions of Frailty Don’t Act Like Frailty
Theoretical models of mortality selection have great utility in explaining otherwise puzzling phenomena. The most famous example may be the Black-White mortality crossover: at old ages, Blacks outlive Whites, presumably because few frail Blacks survive to old ages while some frail Whites do. Yet theoretical models of unidimensional heterogeneity, or frailty, do not speak to the most common empirical situation for mortality researchers: the case i…
Racial Disparities in Covid-19 and Excess Mortality in Minnesota
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has produced vastly disproportionate deaths for communities of color in the United States. Minnesota seemingly stands out as an exception to this national pattern, with white Minnesotans accounting for 80 percent of the population and 82 percent of COVID-19 deaths. The authors examine confirmed COVID-19 mortality alongside deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic-'excess mortality'-in Minneso…
How do populations aggregate
BACKGROUND: Understanding the relationship between populations at different scales plays an important role in many demographic analyses. OBJECTIVE: We show that when a population can be partitioned into subgroups, the death rate for the entire population can be written as the weighted harmonic mean of the death rates in each subgroup, where the weights are given by the numbers of deaths in each subgroup. This decomposition can be generalized to o…
A First Look: Disparities in Covid-19 Mortality Among US-Born and Foreign-Born Minnesota Residents
In a Stationary Population, the Average Lifespan of the Living Is a Length-Biased Life Expectancy
What is the average lifespan in a stationary population viewed at a single moment in time? Even though periods and cohorts are identical in a stationary population, we show that the answer to this question is not life expectancy but a length-biased version of life expectancy. That is, the distribution of lifespans of the people alive at a single moment is a self-weighted distribution of cohort lifespans, such that longer lifespans have proportion…
Racial Disparities in Mortality During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in United States Cities
Against a backdrop of extreme racial health inequality, the 1918 influenza pandemic resulted in a striking reduction of non-White to White influenza and pneumonia mortality disparities in United States cities. We provide the most complete account to date of these reduced racial disparities, showing that they were unexpectedly uniform across cities. Linking data from multiple sources, we then examine potential explanations for this finding, includ…
Race-Specific, State-Specific Covid-19 Vaccination Rates Adjusted for Age
The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Blac…
Racial Inequality in the Prime of Life: Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1906–1933
In the first half of the twentieth century, deaths from infectious disease, especially among the very young, fell dramatically in American cities. However, as infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose, racial inequality in urban infectious disease mortality grew. In this paper, we show that the fall in mortality and the rise in racial inequality in mortality reflected two countervailing processes. The dramatic decline in infant mortality fro…
Examining Excess Mortality Among Critical Workers in Minnesota During 2020–2021: An Occupational Analysis
Objectives. To understand the occupational risk associated with COVID-19 among civilian critical workers (aged 16–65 years) in Minnesota. Methods. We estimated excess mortality in 2020 to 2021 for critical occupations in different racial groups and vaccine rollout phases using death certificates and occupational employment rates for 2017 to 2021. Results. Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic was higher for workers in critical occupations…
Is Covid-19 Mortality “Like the Flu”? A Cumulative Death Rates Comparison
Jessie Himmelstern and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field on a misleading benchmark
Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan
Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery's and Jim Crow's long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an independent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area-level relationships between Blac…
Diverging Mortality Trends by Educational Attainment in the US
This cross-sectional study examines trends in US mortality rates by sex and educational attainment before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the Covid-19 Pandemic
This cohort study examines trends in excess deaths in the US before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
How Ethnoracial Groups Spend Their Time
We know strikingly little about how time use varies across ethnoracial groups in the United States. We describe the daily lives of 210,586 White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people in the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (2003-2019). Activities are similarly unpleasant for all groups, but White people spend the most time on highly pleasant leisure activities, Asian people spend the most time in unpleasant ways, and Black people s…
Three Ways of Looking at Black-White Mortality Differences in the United States
Everyone agrees that US Black deaths happen earlier than white deaths on average, but it is surprisingly challenging to find the best ways to summarize, quantify, and compare this gap. This review argues that there are three main strategies for doing so, falling on a spectrum of more conventional (though with many novel variants) to unexpected. Distributional approaches quantify population death rates or lifespans, and there is a proliferation of…
Sociology (18 works) · Demography (14 works) · Demography (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (11 works) · Population (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Pandemic (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Disease (6 works)