Life span inequality as a function of the moments of the deaths distribution: Connections and insights

Abstract

Recent work has unearthed many empirical regularities in mortality trends, including the inverse correlation between life expectancy and life span inequality, and the compression of mortality into older age ranges. These regularities have furnished important insights into the dynamics of mortality by describing, in demographic terms, how different attributes of the life table deaths distribution interrelate and change over time. However, though empirical evidence suggests that the demographically-meaningful metrics these regularities involve (e.g., life span disparity and life table entropy) are correlated to the moments of the deaths distribution (e.g., variance), the broader theoretical connections between life span inequality and the moments of the deaths distribution have yet to be elucidated. In this article we establish such connections and leverage them to furnish new insights into mortality dynamics. We prove theoretical results linking life span disparity and life table entropy to the central moments of the deaths distribution, and use these results to empirically link statistical measures of variation of the deaths distribution (e.g., variance, index of dispersion) to life span disparity and life table entropy. We validate these results via empirical analyses using data from the Human Mortality Database and extract from them several new insights into mortality shifting and compression in human populations.