Life Inequality

One of the projects I have been working on is finding a way of quantifying inequality.  People who complain about inequality also tend to complain that people focus too much on money.  What few seem to notice is that the type of inequality they tend to focus on is inequality of wealth or income.  The people who complain the loudest about how everyone is focused on money too much are focused on inequality of money.

What I have done to correct this deficiency is to use life tables published by the WHO(for example the U.S. is here) to calculate a Gini-coefficient for the length of lives that various people live in the U.S. and other countries.

The first point I should make is that there is much less of this type of inequality.  The Gini-coefficients for most counties associated with income are higher than the corresponding coefficients for the length of people's lives.  One noteworthy exception is Afghanistan, where widespread poverty and war have shortened many lives, but economic inequality seems to be rather low.

I calculate that inequality of this sort has been decreasing in the U.S.  However the U.S. compares unfavorably to many other countries.  If we rank order all of the countries, with 1 being the most equal country(San Marino) and 193 the most unequal country(Afghanistan) the U.S. comes in at 48 between Malaysia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.  This is probably related to the fact that the U.S. ranks 52nd in number of physicians per capita.  In terms of overall life expectancy the U.S. does a little better ranking 38th.

It would be good to have life tables for the entire world so that I could calculate a similar figure for humanity. This kind of inequality is the one I believe to be most morally relevant.  Other measures of inequality can have perverse incentives.  For example, if a rich country were to keep poor people out then that might make the country look better.