Your own chart confirms my statement, inspite of the misapplied use of the adjective "steady", which you switched to from the "upward trend" you stated in your

Your own chart confirms my statement, inspite of the misapplied use of the adjective "steady", which you switched to from the "upward trend" you stated in your first comment. THERE IS NO UPWARD TREND. What was steady before 2014 is the INCREASE in life expectancy every year. The first derivative was steady. Now the first derivative has been negative and expectancy is only STEADY if you squint your eyes to lower the resolution of the data to 0.5 instead of 0.1 This is a clearer chart with delta measurements https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life... You can see the decline phase in red in the lower split. It's a marked shift from the continuous green line. To see it more clearly set the end date to 2018. You can clearly see from your own data that life expectancy peaked in the United States in 2014 and hasn't recovered yet. If the previous green trend had continued we would be at a life expectancy of 80.0 - not still short if the 2014 peak. The purpose of the example of Cuba is CONTRAST. How a lower income country with a higher baseline life expectancy continues to have a green trend i.e. life expectancy at year n+1 is more than year n - ALWAYS. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CUB/cuba/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CUB/cuba/life-expectan... It has not been "steady". It has reversed trends from a consistent increase in expectancy - green trend - every year since records have been kept. All changes in life expectancy are in the decimal range. Disguising the decline by specifying a range doesn't help.