REMEMBER Occupy Wall Street? Today, 18 months after the protest movement sprang to life in New York City and became a national phenomenon, it seems almost a will-o’-the-wisp. But as Zuccotti Park has returned to its pre-drum circle serenity, one of the main objectives of the Occupy movement has been chugging along: the mission to draw attention to the inequalities at play in American democracy.

Income inequality in America is at levels not seen since the 1920s, and the story is getting a lot of air time. One nifty video, which has gone as viral as a wonkish research report could ever go, suggests that 40% of the nation’s wealth is controlled by the Occupy-derided "one percent”, while the bottom 40% of Americans hold only 1% of the wealth. The video, produced by the unassuming, graphics-gifted Politizane, has attracted over 4m viewers and helps to correct Americans’ misperceptions about the extent of inequality in their polity. Meanwhile, Joseph Stiglitz has thrown the weight of his Nobel prize in economics behind a book on the subject—"The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future"—and penned a New York Times op-ed calling equality of opportunity a “national myth”.

Adding injury to insult, new research reported in the Washington Post finds a link between America's wealth inequality and the life-expectancy gap. Focusing on men and women in two counties in Florida, the data show that being on the wrong side of the wealth gap can, quite literally, kill you.

[St. John’s] county’s plentiful and well-tended golf courses teem with youthful-looking retirees. The same is true on the county’s 41 miles of Atlantic Ocean beaches, abundant tennis courts and extensive network of biking and hiking trails.The healthy lifestyles pay off. Women here can expect to live to be nearly 83, four years longer than they did just two decades earlier, according to research at the University of Washington. Male life expectancy is more than 78 years, six years longer than two decades ago. But in neighboring Putnam County, life is neither as idyllic nor as long. Incomes and housing values are about half what they are in St. Johns. And life expectancy in Putnam has barely budged since 1989, rising less than a year for women to just over 78. Meanwhile, it has crept up by a year and a half for men, who can expect to live to be just over 71, seven years less than the men living a few miles away in St. Johns.

On one hand, none of this is surprising: more money translates into better health care, more leisure, more exercise and less unhealthy fast food. It is not a shock that individuals in the wealthier county would live longer lives, on average. But the research is notable for three reasons. First, the numbers aren’t trivial. We’re talking about a 5-10% boost in life expectancy for wealthy seniors. Second, it is not just a Florida phenomenon: “Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward, reaching 78.5 years in 2009, a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder”. Third, the longer lives for the rich, like a snarled subway train, cause further inequalities up and down the line. Specifically, longer life expectancies for the rich complicate the drive to raise the retirement age and threaten to turn Social Security taxes into a regressive source of revenue. Here is why:

“People who are shorter-lived tend to make less, which means that if you raise the retirement age, low-income populations would be subsidising the lives of higher-income people,” said Maya Rockeymoore, president and chief executive of Global Policy Solutions, a public policy consultancy. “Whenever I hear a policymaker say people are living longer as a justification for raising the retirement age, I immediately think they don’t understand the research or, worse, they are willfully ignoring what the data say.”

Take a minute to process this. As a bipartisan proposal to bring entitlement spending under control, raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 will enlist the working poor to pay into the system for a few more years, curtailing their retirement years to the single digits, while the taxes they pay will flow into Social Security checks for the wealthier and healthier. A senior with a fatter bank account wins twice—with greater longevity and more years drawing Social Security checks—while the poor work longer, live fewer years and collect less in benefits.

One need not be a radical egalitarian to find this picture morally troubling. To draw upon Princeton political theorist Michael Walzer’s view of “complex equality” developed in his 1983 book "Spheres of Justice", the proposal seems wrong because it allows an inequality in one social good (wealth) to “invade the sphere” of another social good (the health and length of one’s life), and to feed back into and exacerbate wealth inequality. Mr Walzer's formula holds that “no social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x”. Wealth can justly enable people to buy “yachts and hi-fi sets and rugs”, he writes, and the “unequal distribution” of these goods “doesn’t matter”, but money should not be permitted to buy political power or the power to dominate others. Nor should great wealth translate into the power to lord longer life expectancies over the poor and to shift more of the burden of work and taxation onto their shoulders.