Good teeth help women in the labour market
Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidell attempt to show in a recent paper that having good teeth is an asset in the labour market.
Their study tracked the earnings of a mix of people comparing those who grew up in communities with fluoridated drinking water and those without. They came to a variety of conclusions based on their analysis:
- women growing up with fluoridated water earn 4% more than those who did not;
- losing one tooth alters earnings of an affected woman by $720/year, and;
- women of low “social economic status” see the biggest benefits of fluoridation.
The point of the paper was to determine if women and men are held to different standards of physical appearance.
The executive summary from the NBER (issued in March, but just emailed last week) doesn’t explicitly say that income of localities was controlled for in the study, though this ambiguous statement was included:
[Fluoridation] spread slowly throughout the United States, without any apparent relationship to wages or family income at the time it was introduced.
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And just how exactly does this square with, considering the highest areas of fluoridation being in American cities, the fact that these areas also have the largest caries levels and the lowest income levels?
It is ridiculous drawing such extrapolations to defend fluoridation, the adding of toxic waste to everyones drinking water in an attempt to kill enzymes in the mouth!