Flouridation

I was rather surprised to see last week that flouridation of the water supply was being discussed here in the UK. I had thought that it all had been flouridated for generations.

Still, here's a very interesting little paper which discusses the merits of doing so:

Different communities began fluoridating their water at different times – for example, St. Louis got started on its fluoridation program in 1953 but Kansas City didn’t get on board until 1983. Other than a tendency water districts serving larger populations to embrace fluoridation earlier, “the decision to fluoridate follows little systematic pattern,” say the economists. That meant that it created a good natural experiment to see how better teeth affect people’s income.

Digging deeper, the economists found that the effect is concentrated among women, who earn 4% more if they grew up with fluoridated water. Women from low-income families, who presumably would have less access to dental care than their better-off counterparts, saw the biggest gains from fluoridation.

That is, that flouridation will help to close the gender pay gap!

* Fluoridation, n'est pas? Pretty good going to use the word three times in a variety of spellings and get none of them right. Apologies.