3 ms·

Why does the mode matter? We are discussing cost, which is related to the the number of retirees. The average lifespan tells you how many people you can expect

• tharkun__ 4y ago
  No it doesn't. If you have 100 people of which 50 died below age 10 and the 50 that survived lived to 75 that's a lot of retirees. If all 100 survive past age 10 but 90 of them die before age 65 you have not a lot of retirees. The exact numbers can work out to the same "life expectancy" with wildly different results for retirement planning. And also in genealogy the high infant mortality rate makes for small average life expectancies and you might be surprised how old most people that survived to adulthood actually got.
• aaomidi 4y ago
  The mode is far more useful here because it gets rid of the war outliers.
• pid-1 4y ago
  Consider the following: 1. A high infant mortality rate brings average lifespan down. 2. Infants don't contribute to the economy nor to public pension funds. A country might have low life expectancy, but a relatively close number of workers and retirees, as life expectances can be (even more so in developing countries) multimodal.
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  When someone says the life expectancy used to be lower and we now have a lot of people who are old are not working would lead you to believe that there were not a lot of old people not working in the past. That would be wrong. The plurality of people were dying at 75 as I said. The average lifespan is very insufficient to tell you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment.