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Meeting-ID: 280 519 2121
Passwort: 584190

Abstract:

Philosophical concepts of health inequities, including normative judgments about the fairness of surviving to different ages, are rarely considered in demographic studies of longevity. The idea of this presentation is to explore some well-studied aspects of the measurement of health inequities and adopt them to the problem of measuring lifespan inequalities. The first paper adopts the capability approach to define deaths that we consider ethically problematic, i.e. premature mortality, and proposes to apply the standard poverty measures to quantify lifespan inequity simultaneously as the prevalence, depth and inequality of lifespan deprivation resulting from premature mortality. The proposed methods are applied to study premature mortality and lifespan inequity in the United States relative to other high-income countries in 1933-2019. Our results show that the high levels of premature mortality and lifespan inequity in the United States are not recent developments, but have been persistent challenges over several decades. In the second paper we introduce the formal differences between the inequality statistics of attainment and deprivation in the study of lifespan inequality. For this paper, we apply the Keyfitz notion that everybody dies prematurely. Based on the simple demographic model of resuscitation, we propose an indicator of inequality in lifespan deprivation. An empirical application focuses on the relationship between the statistics of attainments and deprivation according to the distributions of life table ages at death in high income countries of the Human Mortality Database in 1900-2021. We focus on the question of whether quantifying inequality using the relative inequality of attainment statistics and the relative inequality of deprivation statistics leads to different conclusions about the trends in inequality. We also highlight the effect of three major mortality shocks in the study years, i.e. the Spanish flu, the Second World War and COVID-19, on the two groups of statistics.