Life Inequality by Country

I have just published a list of countries by life inequality as I have defined it in previous posts.  Life inequality is a measure of the inequality in the lengths of lives that people lead.  I have tried to make it a gini coefficient of the length of life based on life tables put out by the World Health Organization.  The standing of the U.S. is just about what you would expect.  The U.S. does above average, but this looks mediocre when you compare it to the performance of other rich countries.  Interestingly enough, life inequality seems to be about the same as income inequality according to my estimate.

My figures are not exact, I should warn you.  I believe that the true figures should be a bit higher.  First I have taken the age at the left of the table and applied it to all of the people within each group.  Also there may be a little bit of inequality in each group.  Since these errors are systematic, they shouldn't effect the rankings all that much.

The next phase of this project will be to compare these figures with other data to see if that sheds any light on life inequality.

I suspect that the things that tend to produce a lower life expectancy in the U.S. are also at work in making life inequality higher here than in other rich countries:  automobiles and obisity are ones that I have mentioned in the past.

I also suspect that the drug market in the U.S. is a factor.  Many other countries set limits on prices for drugs.  This serves to lower the prices of patented medications.  Because these are drugs for which the manufacturers have monopolies, the drug maker will have an incentive to raise their profit by selling less of the drug at a higher price than they would in a competative market.  These profits are justified on the basis that they will help stimulate medical research.  Under normal market conditions attempting to regulate the price in this manner would result in a shortage.  However, if other countries control prices in this manner, the manufacturers will still develop drugs for the U.S. market which they can still sell in these other markets.

Granted there would probably by more research if all countries were to grant the same monopoly profits, but these countries are still likely to continue as they are.  In fact there would be little benefit to their doing otherwise, since the U.S. market is responsible for the bulk of profits in the industry.  Were any country to change over to the same policy as us, there would only be a modest increase in profits from research.  Hence drugs would not be developed much faster.  However, there is no guarantee that if the U.S. were to follow suit, that it wouldn't result in a huge slow down in progress in this regard, since that would result in a huge loss of profit for the industry.

Another factor might be religiousity.  It is difficult to tell how much of a factor this is, but if huge numbers of Americans are relying on faith healing instead of evidence based medicine, then that would account for some of this difference.  However, it would be difficult to tell the direction of causation.  Since reliance on faith healing could be a result of inequality rather than a cause.