In Longevity Asymmetry: Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Biological Stratification. Ho Chi Minh City: Zenodo. 2026Capital has begun pricing something that had no reliable market for most of human history: additional years of biological life. Giulia Dal Maso has named the resulting configuration longevity capitalism, in which both the condition of living longer and the pursuit of longevity become frontiers of accumulation. This essay takes that diagnosis as its starting point and asks a question Dal Maso's account raises but does not itself resolve: under what authority, if any, is the resulting allocation of discovery and access being decided. Eva Erman and Markus Furendal's account of political legitimacy distinguishes entities authorized by democratic procedure from entities merely delegated a task, and, in more recent work, distinguishes non-state actors formally licensed to act as democratic agents from those that instead exercise unauthorized moral, epistemic, or market authority. Read together, the two frameworks show that the capital markets Dal Maso describes are not a case democratic-legitimacy theory has evaluated and found wanting; they are a case that theory's own vocabulary of authorization was never invoked to cover, because a fund pricing an asset does not present itself as a claimant to governing power in the first place. Long before any intervention reaches a patient, uneven access to the computational tools increasingly used in biological research can produce uneven rates of discovery, a gap in who learns something first rather than in who can eventually pay for it; and once a discovery exists, turning it into something a person can actually receive is itself a multi-stage process governed by a slower clock that money cannot fully buy down. Drawing on the study of longevity's financialization, the political theory of legitimate authority, the sociology of individualized risk, an economic theory of markets that reach into the foundations of social life, and two live institutional cases, a global effort to distribute vaccines equitably and a government's decision to build a dedicated authority around the longevity industry, the essay traces how the distance between financing a discovery and delivering it may not close on its own, and asks what it means that the room where this is being decided has never been asked to answer for deciding it. ( direct link )