3 ms·

How is life expectancy not easy to measure? (Unless you mean without disturbing them)

• gregwebs 16y ago
  life expectancy in civilization is easy enough to measure. However, by definition it is very difficult to measure life expectancy of isolated people. First you must contact them- which starts to change them. Second, you must determine their age, which is a difficult task. The real problem is that using life expectancy by itself is misleading- it mostly represents access to emergency medicine and antibiotics, and the harshness of the environment. We can keep people alive in the USA for a very long time, but that doesn't mean they are healthy.
• necolas 16y ago
  Why should we assume 'life expectancy' is an absolute measure of progress. One could equally argue that what one does over the course of a lifetime is more important than how long it lasts. Many people in our social systems spend the best part of 15 years in school, then 40 years working 40 hours a week, and may spend their final years riddled with diseases; depression and mental illness are on the rise; obesity, diabetes, back problems, etc., are increasingly common even in the young. It was only relatively recently that the overall health of a person living in an agricultural society came to be comparable with the health inferred from ancient hunter gatherer skeletons. There is no way to objectively 'measure' whether their lives or ours are better spent or more enjoyable.