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Life expectancy in 1946 was 64.4 for men and 69.4 for women for an average of 66.9. Now it’s an averages 78.6, 12 years longer. And US life expectancy has drop

Life expectancy in 1946 was 64.4 for men and 69.4 for women for an average of 66.9. Now it’s an averages 78.6, 12 years longer. And US life expectancy has dropped 1.5 years recently due to opioid deaths. Drop that from the equation and you’re looking at nice even 80. I’m sure there’s a lot of legitimate quibbling to be done over my numbers. Obviously 20 wasnt the right number, but also obviously the general point stands: Boomers have lived a lot longer than anyone expected them to. If they lived as long as their parents had on average, we would be running out of them already. As an aside. The above numbers really explain why social security and other pensions are in so much trouble. The greatest generation expected to receive only a few years of benefits on average, 1.4 for men and 4.4 for women. A tiny proportion of a worker’s lifetime wages would be required to cover these costs, better still since multiple workers would exist per retiree. Boomers on the other hand are legally entitled to a solid decade or more worth of benefits, an increase of an order of magnitude in time, not to mention increasing health costs. This combined with the unusually high ratio of retirees to workers, again caused by the unusual size of the Boomers, is a recipe for disaster.

WalterBright 8y ago
Remove infant mortality from those numbers. There has been dramatic improvements in infant mortality, and IM really drags down the average. A realistic figure for your position would be life expectancy at age 20.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  An excellent point. This data was much harder to find, but I finally got it. You are correct in that infant mortality rates have had a huge impact on life expectancy as a whole. An infant in 1900-1902 could expect 49.24 years, while one born in 2003 can expect 77.4. But non-infant life expectancy has risen pretty dramatically too. A 20 year old in 1900-1902 could expect to live another 42.79 years, while a 20 year old in 2003 could expect another 58.4 years. This trend continues the further up the age bracket you go. A 30 year old in 1939 could expect another 39.67 years, while that's up to 48.9 by 2003, a solid gain of 9 years. Of course, Boomers are not 20 in 2003, they were 20 somewhere between 1966 and 1984. So the gap between the Boomers and their parents is a bit smaller than that (although the gap between Millenials and the Greatest Generation is huge). By my very rough estimate, the gap between the Boomers and their parents life expectancy hovers around 4-7 years, depending on how large the age gap between the Boomer and their parent. The gap appears to get the biggest around middle age, presumably because of improvements to medicine and reductions in Tobacco usage. I tried to list out the data points I'm looking at, but it just didn't work in sentence form. Instead look at the raw data at [0]. Table 11 is my source, but I was just looking at all races and genders. Presumably one would see different results once you start breaking it down by demographics. 0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf

WalterBright 8y ago

Remove infant mortality from those numbers. There has been dramatic improvements in infant mortality, and IM really drags down the average. A realistic figure for your position would be life expectancy at age 20.

village-idiot 8y ago
An excellent point. This data was much harder to find, but I finally got it. You are correct in that infant mortality rates have had a huge impact on life expectancy as a whole. An infant in 1900-1902 could expect 49.24 years, while one born in 2003 can expect 77.4. But non-infant life expectancy has risen pretty dramatically too. A 20 year old in 1900-1902 could expect to live another 42.79 years, while a 20 year old in 2003 could expect another 58.4 years. This trend continues the further up the age bracket you go. A 30 year old in 1939 could expect another 39.67 years, while that's up to 48.9 by 2003, a solid gain of 9 years. Of course, Boomers are not 20 in 2003, they were 20 somewhere between 1966 and 1984. So the gap between the Boomers and their parents is a bit smaller than that (although the gap between Millenials and the Greatest Generation is huge). By my very rough estimate, the gap between the Boomers and their parents life expectancy hovers around 4-7 years, depending on how large the age gap between the Boomer and their parent. The gap appears to get the biggest around middle age, presumably because of improvements to medicine and reductions in Tobacco usage. I tried to list out the data points I'm looking at, but it just didn't work in sentence form. Instead look at the raw data at [0]. Table 11 is my source, but I was just looking at all races and genders. Presumably one would see different results once you start breaking it down by demographics. 0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf