ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on economic resources, education's relationship to income and economic prosperity, and explores the roles of privation, hardship, and access to medical care as possible links to health. It shows education's relationship to work-related statuses such as categories of employment, occupations, and their attributes, and the autonomy, creativity, and authority of the work. The chapter analyzes the correlations between health and these work-related statuses, looking for the specific links that reveal the nature of the connection. Occupational status is a graded dimension that represents the relative prestige, honor, standing, and esteem typically accorded a person's occupation. Education greatly increases full-time employment and decreases both part-time employment and unemployment. The level of health differs considerably across employment statuses for several reasons. Even though some occupations are much riskier than others, the overall levels of occupational risk are so low that differences in health associated with occupations generally vanish against the background of health differences created by other socioeconomic forces.
