3 ms·

I find that very hard to believe. Do you say that in the full knowledge that you'd be giving up roughly 20 years of life expectancy? In 1929, life expectancy wa

I find that very hard to believe. Do you say that in the full knowledge that you'd be giving up roughly 20 years of life expectancy? In 1929, life expectancy was late 50s for men, it's now almost 80 for men. That's roughly a 34% increase, and it's even higher when you consider all of those extra years are adult, master-of-your-fate years.

vivekd 10y ago
That life expectancy equation is a bunch of malarky. It means average time a person is expected to live based on death rates. So if you have a high infant mortality rate, it will affect the numbers. For example, in Sri Lanka during my grandparents time the life expectancy was abysmal but both they and most of the people around them lived healthy into old age, probably much healthier than the average elderly person now. The language is misleading because "life expectancy" is a statistic used to measure how likely you are to die not how long you are expected to live.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  Your grandparents and their friends may have simply been lucky. You also have to be careful of survivorship bias. Yes, a high infant mortality rate skews the figures. Still, I'd be willing to bet that the average 40 year old in 1929 had a life expectancy at least 10 years less than the average 40 year old in 2017. Edit: Table 21 in this report is informative: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf Expected years remaining for a 40 year old in 1929-31 was 29.67. In 2011 it was 40.58.