Lifespan Inequality

Lifespan inequality measures how unequally length of life is distributed within a population — the spread of the life-table ages at death, not just their average. Two populations can share the same life expectancy yet differ sharply in how predictable death is: in one nearly everyone reaches old age, in the other deaths are scattered across all ages. A family of measures — life disparity (e†), the standard deviation of age at death, the life-table Gini coefficient, and Keyfitz entropy — quantifies this dispersion, complementing life expectancy with a measure of how fairly survival is shared.