A recent study by the Austrian Academy of Sciences investigates the extent to which education drives mortality by studying male Catholic order members living in religious communities. The result: the level of education plays a less significant role when access to money, networks, and power is the same.
In Austria, the difference in life expectancy between individuals with a university degree and those with only compulsory schooling is approximately three years for women and seven years for men, according to data from Statistics Austria. Is education, therefore, a decisive factor? Or, put differently: Do lower educated people die earlier? A new study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour explores this question. The researchers wanted to know to what extent education influences life expectancy when access to other resources such as money, power and beneficial connections is largely the same.
Marc Luy from the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), along with a team of researchers from Statistics Austria and the University of Dortmund, used data from the so-called ‘Cloister Study’ to answer this question. The central research question was whether socio-economic status impacts mortality even under standardised living conditions. For the analysis, the life data of 2,421 monks born between 1840 and 1959 and living in a monastic community were analysed.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS AS A CAUSE OF HEALTH INEQUALITIES
The results show no statistically significant differences in mortality between monks of higher and lower education level. This finding applies to all birth cohorts analysed.
Demographer Marc Luy summarises the study’s findings: ‘Our Cloister Study shows that, regardless of their education level, monks experience almost identical mortality over a period of more than 100 years. This finding supports the so-called ‘fundamental cause theory’, which states that social differences in health are primarily caused by the unequal access to flexibly usable resources such as money, knowledge, beneficial networks or power.’
THE LIVES OF ORDER MEMBERS AS A MODEL
While socio-economic differences are often considered decisive drivers of mortality, the impact of social status is obviously significantly lower under largely equal living conditions - as is the case in a monastery.
Could social differences in life expectancy be reduced if access to resources were more equitable? Yes, says Luy. ‘This becomes evident from the fact that the missing of social differences in mortality found in the study results from the low mortality of monks with lower education. They catch up in life expectancy with highly educated monks and highly educated men of the general population, as we have documented in a previous study.’
ROOTS OF THE CLOISTER STUDY
The roots of the ‘Cloister Study’ date back to the 1990s, when Marc Luy began using the living conditions of monks and nuns as a model to explore the causes of differences in life expectancy between women and men. Religious communities offer ideal conditions for minimising the impact of non-biological factors on mortality, such as lifestyle, income, social status and access to medical care.
For more information on the ‘Cloister Study’, visit
Publication:
“No Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mortality among Catholic Monks: A Quasi-Experiment Providing Evidence for the Fundamental Cause Theory”, Alina Schmitz, Patrick Lazarevič, and Marc Luy, Journal of health and Social Behaviour, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465241291847