Inequality in Life Spans and Mortality Convergence Across Industrialized Countries

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed much conver-gence in life expectancy around the world. Closer inspection of mor-tality trends in advanced countries reveals that inequality in adult life spans, which we measure with the standard deviation of ages at death above age 10, S10, is increasingly responsible for the remaining diver-gence in mortality. We report striking differences in level and trend of S10 across industrialized countries since 1960, which cannot be ex-plained by aggregate socioeconomic inequality or differential external-cause mortality. Rather, S10 reflects both within and between-group inequalities in life spans and conveys new information about their combined magnitudes and trends. These findings suggest that the challenge for health policies in this century is to reduce inequality, not just lengthen life. The human condition has improved tremendously during the course of modern development. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, life ex-pectancy at birth, e0, hovered between 25 to 40 years (Maddison, 2001). Industrialization and unprecedented growth in per-capita incomes coincided with significant gains in e0, which by 1960 reached roughly 70 years amon