LIFEINEQ made considerable progress in documenting and understanding the trends and causes of lifespan inequality. The most important findings of the project include the following:
- Lifespan inequalities are stagnant or increasing among individuals with lower socioeconomic status, even when life expectancy itself is rising. This has been uncovered across many parts of Europe and the United States and seems to hold for different measures of socioeconomic position including education, occupation, income, and area-level deprivation.
- A number of populations experienced sustained periods of increasing lifespan inequality in the past few decades, including the United States, Central and Eastern European countries (CEE), and several Latin American countries (LAC). Typically the causes of these increases are related to midlife mortality crises such as the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States, periods of economic crises and hardship in CEE, and periods of increasing homicide mortality in LAC.
- The empirically negative correlation between life expectancy and lifespan inequality is weakening across high-income countries, particularly when absolute rather than relative inequality is measured. It does not appear to hold at all for subgroups with low socioeconomic status. The correlation is also weak or non-existent among populations undergoing midlife mortality crises.
- In the United States, many of the determinants of mortality from extrinsic causes of death, for instance, influenza, drug overdose, alcohol abuse, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and suicide show strong patterning by birth cohort, with trailing-edge baby boomers fairing poorly compared to those born before and afterwards.
- There is a disconnect between population-level ranking of lifespan inequality depending on the temporal frame examined, i.e. period (year), cohort (birth year), or cross-sectional average (average exposure to ages at death over the lifetime of those present).
- Ages at death are becoming increasingly distinct across income groups in Finland. We used a statistical overlap measure of the age-at-death distributions from life tables to measure this. This finding is related to both gaps in mean ages at death as well as differences in lifespan variation.
Altogether, LIFEINEQ members published 34 peer-reviewed articles, 4 book or encyclopedia chapters, and 3 PhD dissertations (which were carried out fully or in part while working on the project). The findings above appeared in leading journals of general science, demography, and public health/epidemiology such as Science, Demography, International Journal of Epidemiology and Social Science and Medicine.
In addition to our scientific output, LIFEINEQ members organized numerous training courses at the PhD and early-career researcher stages on demographic methods, published an R-package "LifeIneq" for calculating measures of lifespan variability from life tables, and co-organized an externally-funded workshop on ageing and health in Sub-Saharan Africa, held in Entebbe, Uganda.
Our researchers and results received considerable international media attention, including die Welt, FAZ, el Pais, etc., as well as over social media channels including Twitter.
