4 ms·

It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair. If you want to talk about unfair comparisons, you should look to all th

by tpeo 9y ago

It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair. If you want to talk about unfair comparisons, you should look to all the people aged past 5 who wouldn't be alive without modern medicine (e.g. most terminal patients, some severe burn patients, some people with congenital defects, etc) and who inevitably lower the average health measures of our current populations. There's some seriously strong self-selection bias at work here: as medicine advances, the difference in health indicators between earlier and later adult populations would always be increasingly favorable to the latter.

lucozade 9y ago
> It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair. It's not like for like. The comparison they use is life expectancy at birth now versus life expectancy at 65 in 1850. If you use the correct comparison i.e. life expectancy at 5 for both, it's 54.6 in 1841 and 79.4 in 2011. I link to the ONS source is a separate post.
- dmurray 9y ago
  They are confused about something else, too. This doesn't seem plausible: > At 65, men could expect another ten years of life; and women another eight [24,32,33] (the lower figure for women reflects the high danger of death in childbirth...) It's as if they started writing the article using life expectancy at 5 everywhere, but had to change some places to make the numbers fit.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    > the lower figure for women reflects the high danger of death in childbirth I have to say, I didn't notice that. If they have any evidence that significant numbers of 19C women in their late sixties were dying from complications due to childbirth, that would be an interesting article. The more I read it, the more I think it's an April Fool that was published a week or two early by mistake.
- tpeo 9y ago
  Guess I'm wrong about that then! It's hard to skim an article with this much noise-to-signal ratio.
georgeecollins 9y ago
That was my point. They are selecting all people aged past 5, not just the ones that would have survived to five in Victorian times, which is presumably a healthier cohort.

by tpeo 9y ago

lucozade 9y ago

> It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair. It's not like for like. The comparison they use is life expectancy at birth now versus life expectancy at 65 in 1850. If you use the correct comparison i.e. life expectancy at 5 for both, it's 54.6 in 1841 and 79.4 in 2011. I link to the ONS source is a separate post.

dmurray 9y ago
They are confused about something else, too. This doesn't seem plausible: > At 65, men could expect another ten years of life; and women another eight [24,32,33] (the lower figure for women reflects the high danger of death in childbirth...) It's as if they started writing the article using life expectancy at 5 everywhere, but had to change some places to make the numbers fit.
- lucozade 9y ago
  > the lower figure for women reflects the high danger of death in childbirth I have to say, I didn't notice that. If they have any evidence that significant numbers of 19C women in their late sixties were dying from complications due to childbirth, that would be an interesting article. The more I read it, the more I think it's an April Fool that was published a week or two early by mistake.
tpeo 9y ago
Guess I'm wrong about that then! It's hard to skim an article with this much noise-to-signal ratio.

georgeecollins 9y ago

That was my point. They are selecting all people aged past 5, not just the ones that would have survived to five in Victorian times, which is presumably a healthier cohort.