Life Expectancy

Life Expectancy: A New Wrinkle for Equal Opportunity Policy

Are differences in life expectancy something we ought to account for in equal opportunity policies? Although this is not often discussed in the literature, my intuition is that the answer is yes. Furthermore, it is not merely a hypothetical issue—advances in medical technologies have sharply mitigated the great leveller, but only for those who can pay. The Plague of Justinian (541–542), the first known pandemic on record,1 the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the 1918 influenza pandemic are all evidence of infectious disease that did not discriminate much between king and pauper.