5 ms·
This conflates life expectancy at birth with your current life expectancy. Those are wildly different. They were even more different in the past when life expe
by bambax 5y ago
This conflates life expectancy at birth with your current life expectancy. Those are wildly different.
They were even more different in the past when life expectancy at birth was below 30, and most healthy adults lived past 70.
But they're still very different.
- kqr 5y agoOne of my favourite simple plots: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
- luckman212 5y agoWhat's with that huge drop in life expectancy between 1910-1920?
- mmcwilliams 5y agoI would expect WWI had something to do with that. Spanish Flu as well.
- HPsquared 5y agoI wonder if there will be a similar dip in 2020-21.
- kqr 5y agoNot visibly, no. Several reasons, where the most obvious is that our medical care and availability of information has massively improved. Another is that the 1918 pandemic hit young and healthy people disproportionately.
- eCa 5y agoA dip, but nothing like the 1910’s. I’ve heard a rediction of up to two years. Covid mostly killed older people, while WW1 for obvious reasons mostly killed young people, therefore having a greater effect on life expectancy.
- owlninja 5y agoInfluenza epidemic of 1918 possibly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
- DaveExeter 5y agoWorld War I?
- dragonwriter 5y agoWWI killed a huge number of people (about 1% of world population), largely in young adulthood. The 1918 flu epidemic killed even more (3 times as many), but not weighted as young; together it was a big hit on life expectancy.
- watwut 5y ago> most healthy adults lived past 70 Citation needed. Or, qualification of what you mean by "healthy adult".
- dahart 5y agoHere you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity Human Longevity has been around 70-80 years for thousands of years we know about, and possibly forever. It’s one of the common misunderstandings we get by learning about life expectancy.. I misunderstood it for a long time until my brother, an anthropologist, explained that there are historical records of people living to be 80 years old from a thousand and even 10,000 years ago. Life expectancy averages in a bunch of causes of early death, so it skews the average down. Longevity is what you’re left with when you factor out all the causes of early death. Life expectancy is going up because we’re eliminating the causes of early death mostly via basic medicine, clean water, washing hands, anti-bacterials. Not having wars helps. Vaccines help. Safer houses & jobs help. Etc. Longevity appears to have been increasing a little in the last century, possibly because life expectancy and longevity aren’t cleanly separable (nobody dies of old age, they eventually die of a disease or injury).
- watwut 5y ago"Most adults" fall under "life expectancy after reaching adulthood" rather then "longevity". Adult young people and middle aged people died a lot more then today. Whether due to incidents that were more common and harder to treat or sicknesses. If you limit the stats to "adults never never got seriously sick and never got injured" then the comparison is completely meaningless. Yeah, people did evolved to live longer, but we do expect more treatment and health.
- dahart 5y agoSure, all adults fall under life expectancy from their current age. It’s always a Bayesian statistic. The comment you replied to might be off by ~10 or even ~20 years -- depending heavily on what year and location we’re talking about -- but it’s still a valid point and it has always been true that surviving childhood to be 20 years old gave you a dramatically higher probability of leading a long life. The plot @kqr posted demonstrates this over the last 300 years.
- mbg721 5y agoI think the tables that actuaries use are publicly available and account for that. The thing to watch for would be that you're not using something with a lot of built-in conservatism meant for life insurance statutory compliance.
- everybodyknows 5y ago> life insurance statutory compliance. Interesting -- can you elaborate on whatever unrealities are forced upon life insurers by government?
- mbg721 5y agoIt's not unrealities, it's just that you want some cushion before your life insurer goes bankrupt. That's why statutory and GAAP are different accounting standards.
- kurthr 5y agoLOL! You have -3.8% of your expected lifespan remaining I assumed they would get this right, how sad.