If you want to hang around, get ahead. Higher status is a prescription for a longer life, according to research released today.

Hollywood Oscar winners live an average of four years longer than other Hollywood actors. Senior civil servants will enjoy better health and longer retirement than their underlings. Doctors of philosophy are likely to outlive masters of arts, and people who leave university with a BA will outlive contemporaries who left school at 16, according to Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London who has spent his research career examining the link between social status and health.

In any group - from Whitehall civil servants to tribes of baboons in Africa - the gradient of social status is a guide to health.

He said: "You might say the whole thing is inevitable: let us just give up and go home. Let's start worrying about obesity again. My argument is it is not inevitable. Hierarchies are inevitable. But how hierarchies translate into differences in health is the crucial question."

What matters most, Professor Marmot argues in a new book Status Syndrome, is the relative inequality of a society. The closer and more socially coherent the culture, the less the gap in life expectancy. In the US, one of the world's richest countries, life expectancy was 76.9 years. In Cuba, one of the poorer nations, life expectancy was 76.5 years.

The same effect was visible within nations and even cities. In the former Soviet Union, life expectancy fell by seven years in little more than seven years after the introduction of free market capitalism. In a journey from downtown Washington to Montgomery County, Maryland, life expectancy rose by about a year and a half for each mile travelled. There was a 20-year gap in life expectancy between a poor black man at one end of the journey and a rich white male at the other.

Even in Britain, a journey of six stops on the London Underground might notch up a change of life expectancy at the rate of a year for every stop, he said.

The differences in life expectancy between Kensington and Chelsea and Tower Hamlets was about six years.

"The magnitude of the social gradient in health varies. It varies over time and it varies across societies, and in Britain, it got bigger. It got dramatically bigger between the 1970s and the 1990s and there is a hint - a welcome hint - that it might just now be getting a little smaller again. So it can change. If the gradient in health can change, even though hierarchies are inevitable, it doesn't mean hierarchies in health are inevitable," he said.

There had been a small, continued increase in pre-tax income inequality. But the chancellor had reduced the impact of that by redistributing income from the higher to the lower paid. Prof Marmot said: "As a colleague of mine has said, this is the first Labour government in history that has done more redistribution than it claims to have done. They have been quite silent about the degree of redistribution they have been doing."