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I've always been frustrated by these figures because life expectancy has gone up due to reducing infant mortality. It doesn't mean our lifestyle has made humans

I've always been frustrated by these figures because life expectancy has gone up due to reducing infant mortality. It doesn't mean our lifestyle has made humans live longer. It would appear that a more useful metric is number of centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1960, England & Wales had 11.6 centenarians per million. On the 1.1.1990 this increased to 76.3 centenarians per million.[1] Another way to look at it is the risk of death for a given age tracked over time.[2] If you were 60 years old in 1900, would you have a higher risk of death compared to 2000? [1] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm https://www.demogr.mpg.de/Papers/Books/Monograph2/search.htm [2] http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

ekianjo 8y ago
yes reducing infant mortality to close to zero is what has brought the average lifespan up. This is always a good example to use when you want to show that looking only at the average value is meaningless to understand what is really happening.
branchless 8y ago
Rising life expectancy is used as a justification for pushing pension ages ever higher, when, as you note, it's really just means people who reach working age work for longer.
zdragnar 8y ago
I wonder if your time frame and location are heavily skewed by WW2 losses.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Centenarians in 1960 would have been 79 in 1939. Far too old for military service. A dip in the numbers, if realised, would only appear many decades later.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    A whole lot more people than soldiers died in the war, given rationing, bombing and what not. 1990 centenarians would have been a more hearty 49 at the time. Just a thought.
883771773929 8y ago
Exactly, and the reason why infant mortality has gone down also has a twist to it that's usually spun for profit. It's not due to heroic advances in obstetrics, nutrition, or even medical care in general, but rather fertility demographic changes. If you're in a metro area, go to your nearest hospital with a labor wing and ask any nurse on staff if they can describe any pattern between characteristics of a woman and how fast she delivers her offspring. The greatest predictor of risk in death of either an infant or a mother in childbirth is duration of labor. The second greatest predictor of labor death risk is age of the mother. A growing trend in fertility for a long time by now is positive correlation with poverty, illiteracy, and religious susceptibility. There's also a very effective self-interested cultural and economical push towards _certain_ women fully embracing the (in)action of stopping their lineage either actively through choice or even passively through delay by necessity against the ticking time bomb that is menopause to receive better individual outcomes than creating children for sake of retirement insurance when now such old-age risk can now be offloaded to a pooled global society that has a huge reserve of more fertility-friendly cultures. In addition legal incentives and even unintended economic punishments push _certain_ demographics of males towards rationally opting out of procreation in order to stave off undesirable consequences for their wealth and happiness. Tangentially, it's not something that people like to talk about in public discourse, but there has also been a very prominent trend of decreasing age in the arrival of puberty especially for girls. All of these factors are are the outcomes of individuals, demographics, and society in general implementing changes to their reproductive strategies and over time these choices reinforce themselves through natural selection. And of course this will reflect on some opaque metrics such as "average life expectancy" if you are not able to sub-categorize the averages.
charmides 8y ago
The second metric is more useful since the former one is still affected to some degree by those who die early. Would be cool to get some more data on that second metric.
BurningFrog 8y ago
This is just not true. Reducing infant mortality is the biggest factor, sure, but death risk is significantly lower for all ages.
- martin-adams 8y ago
  I think then simple question I'm trying to ascertain using these figures, are we on a trend that could see humans living to 150 years old? Look at that data and it would suggest so, but I suspect that we are not. That is either because we're not actually living longer as a species or there is a hard limit on how long humans can live.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    There is a pretty hard limit at 110-120 where things just fall apart from pure age.
MarkMc 8y ago
You may find this graph useful: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e... It suggests that life expectancy has gone up sinificantly for all age groups, not just life expectancy at birth.
- 883771773929 8y ago
  Here's the methods protocol [0] for designing version 6 of the Human Mortality Database being visualized at that link. Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like 'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with dubious constructed data. If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death risk. Stay tuned for v.7!" On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called 'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle. Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles, peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering. I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets. And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float. [0] https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf

ekianjo 8y ago

yes reducing infant mortality to close to zero is what has brought the average lifespan up. This is always a good example to use when you want to show that looking only at the average value is meaningless to understand what is really happening.

branchless 8y ago

Rising life expectancy is used as a justification for pushing pension ages ever higher, when, as you note, it's really just means people who reach working age work for longer.

zdragnar 8y ago

I wonder if your time frame and location are heavily skewed by WW2 losses.

andrepd 8y ago
Centenarians in 1960 would have been 79 in 1939. Far too old for military service. A dip in the numbers, if realised, would only appear many decades later.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  A whole lot more people than soldiers died in the war, given rationing, bombing and what not. 1990 centenarians would have been a more hearty 49 at the time. Just a thought.

883771773929 8y ago

Exactly, and the reason why infant mortality has gone down also has a twist to it that's usually spun for profit. It's not due to heroic advances in obstetrics, nutrition, or even medical care in general, but rather fertility demographic changes. If you're in a metro area, go to your nearest hospital with a labor wing and ask any nurse on staff if they can describe any pattern between characteristics of a woman and how fast she delivers her offspring. The greatest predictor of risk in death of either an infant or a mother in childbirth is duration of labor. The second greatest predictor of labor death risk is age of the mother. A growing trend in fertility for a long time by now is positive correlation with poverty, illiteracy, and religious susceptibility. There's also a very effective self-interested cultural and economical push towards _certain_ women fully embracing the (in)action of stopping their lineage either actively through choice or even passively through delay by necessity against the ticking time bomb that is menopause to receive better individual outcomes than creating children for sake of retirement insurance when now such old-age risk can now be offloaded to a pooled global society that has a huge reserve of more fertility-friendly cultures. In addition legal incentives and even unintended economic punishments push _certain_ demographics of males towards rationally opting out of procreation in order to stave off undesirable consequences for their wealth and happiness. Tangentially, it's not something that people like to talk about in public discourse, but there has also been a very prominent trend of decreasing age in the arrival of puberty especially for girls. All of these factors are are the outcomes of individuals, demographics, and society in general implementing changes to their reproductive strategies and over time these choices reinforce themselves through natural selection. And of course this will reflect on some opaque metrics such as "average life expectancy" if you are not able to sub-categorize the averages.

charmides 8y ago

The second metric is more useful since the former one is still affected to some degree by those who die early. Would be cool to get some more data on that second metric.

BurningFrog 8y ago

This is just not true. Reducing infant mortality is the biggest factor, sure, but death risk is significantly lower for all ages.

martin-adams 8y ago
I think then simple question I'm trying to ascertain using these figures, are we on a trend that could see humans living to 150 years old? Look at that data and it would suggest so, but I suspect that we are not. That is either because we're not actually living longer as a species or there is a hard limit on how long humans can live.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  There is a pretty hard limit at 110-120 where things just fall apart from pure age.

MarkMc 8y ago

You may find this graph useful: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e... It suggests that life expectancy has gone up sinificantly for all age groups, not just life expectancy at birth.

883771773929 8y ago
Here's the methods protocol [0] for designing version 6 of the Human Mortality Database being visualized at that link. Notice how I explicity said the word _designing_ and not something like 'calculating' which would misleadingly characterize such a scheme as something that is objectively derivable from verifiable information with valid uncertainty bounds and without the potential for advocating policy with dubious constructed data. If you've ever thought p-hacking was a riot in academia's social sciences bullshitting, wait until you read through stuff like this with think-tanks coming up with whatever numbers are necessary to justify a policy to secure more funding to shroud misinformation in a thin veil of perceived scientific validity to people who feel comforted if you just put on a white coat. Not only does it go through "careful rexaminations" of methodology with new versions every year tweaking subtle but fundamental things like "we used to assume uniform distributions of births across the entire year on v.5 and as of v.6 now we decided to assume a proprietary non-uniform distribution that flucuates per year (and our policy objectives...) because there were wars that changed reproductive strategies that we conveniently forgot to account for that last year and the error cascades through to every successive year's death risk. Stay tuned for v.7!" On top of that and pretty much a direct consequence of this so called 'research' being complete bollocks, is that none of this junk is ever peer-reviewed. Couldn't even clear that hurdle. Sorry to ruin your parade but the statistics accessible via think-tanks and public governments are a complete fabrication. Want to see actual life expectancy tables? You need to buyout a multi-national insurance conglomerate that has survived the test of time with financial crises and political cycles, peeking into actuary tables without the gimmicks of literal data engineering. I highly doubt you, nor anyone here, would ever get close to these secrets. And even then, the usual business model of such corporations that can attain that large of a risk pool and _could_ identify these stats are usually incentivized to profit from regulatory capture rather than the public-face tagline of accurately predicting the likelihood of risk to perfectly balance premiums against claims and extract profit from investing on the float. [0] https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf https://www.mortality.org/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocol.pdf