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Life expectancy has been increasing by ever smaller amounts in the past decades. I am hopefully that a lot of new technologies could help buck that trend, but s

• ekianjo 11y ago
  It was mainly increasing because we almost made the death at birth close to zero. Now the gains are much harder to get on the other side.
  • nkozyra 11y ago
    Most people - at least most people here - know that a lot of those publicized numbers are due to infant mortality, but ... Post-childhood life expectancy has gone up in smaller amounts as the parent comment says. The grand numbers ("life expectancy was just 60 in 1900!") obviously reflect infant and childhood mortality, but we've increased the average lifespan in the United States by 2-3 years in the last few decades alone. Here's a graph that shows life expectancy at various ages in the UK - you can see this is not all due to childhood mortality: http://www.maxroser.com/gains-for-all-life-expectancy-by-age/ http://www.maxroser.com/gains-for-all-life-expectancy-by-age...
    • 3pt14159 11y ago
      This is quite compelling. At first I was going to mention the absence of war, but that shouldn't impact people in their 70s.
  • Spooky23 11y ago
    Life expectancy is a tricky figure. Avoiding childhood death improved life expectancy at birth most dramatically on a global scale. But if you look from other points (say life expectancy at age 20), or scope it for locality and gender, the ability to intervene for many formerly mortal events pushed the needle up significantly. Examples: heart attacks, diabetes, cancer. The differences aren't as dramatic -- saving someone from a heart attack at 50 may move the needle 5 years. But they are real.