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The numbers here seem higher than what I have obtained in previous attempts. I suspect these new figures are much closer to what would be gini coefficients. The numbers are much higher than for income or consumption, and this merits serious attention.
It is very easy to argue that people have been focusing on the wrong thing when it comes to inequality. Imagine two scenarios. In one you get to live just as long, but your income is cut in half. In the other your income is constant and it is the length of your life that is cut in half. Which would be worse. Now image instead of cutting each in half we are thinking about a doubling in each scenario. Which would be better. I think that most people would opt for the longer life. I know I would.
In addition to this the numbers measuring life inequality are greater than for income inequality, so even if income inequality and life inequality were equally serious, we would want to put more thought into life inequality since there is more of it. Hence it is obvious that life inequality deserves more attention than income inequality. You could argue that sometimes there are unfortunate accidents that cut one life short, so we couldn't really produce life equality if we wanted to, that is short of intentionally cutting some lives short, which would be immoral. However, much the same thing could be said about income equality. Chance plays a role in people's incomes.
As a further topic for research, we could look at figures for life inequality for several different countries and compare these results with those for economic liberty in order to see how institutions effect this new measure. I suspect that we a model used to describe this relationship would be improved by noting the impact that automobiles have on life inequality, since accidents are one of the leading causes of death in young people in countries where cars are used more extensively.
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