Sleep is a luxury good: poor Americans get less than the rich

This chart shows a stark divide between how much sleep rich and poor Americans get. The less you make, the likelier you are to sleep less than six hours a night:

In 2013, 35.2 percent of adults below the poverty line reported getting less than six hours of sleep per night. Among those earning 400 percent of the poverty line ($47,080 for an individual and $97,000 for a family of four) or above, the number falls to 27.7 percent.

Overall, Americans tend to sleep less than people in other countries — including Canada, Germany, and Mexico, just to name a few other places. It's enough of a problem that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called the lack of sleep in America an epidemic. This new data suggests that the epidemic's costs aren't borne equally: low-income Americans are suffering more.

(h/t Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times)

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