2 ms·

Most of the logic about endless life expectancy take improvement in healthcare as the fundamental driving factor. And in the past, the wealthy were no better of

Most of the logic about endless life expectancy take improvement in healthcare as the fundamental driving factor. And in the past, the wealthy were no better off than the impoverished here because you couldn't buy that which didn't exist. Germ theory didn't exist, let alone antibiotics, even hand washing as a thing before surgery didn't yet exist. And what I was alluding to in my comment was what happened to George Washington. He died at a relatively early age of 67 of a throat infection, or of the 5 pints of blood that was taken from him to 'cure' that infection leaving portraits of him on his death bed as being white as a ghost.

cogman10 2y ago
> the wealthy were no better off than the impoverished here Eh, in some ways but not all ways. The wealthy, for example, were much more likely to receive proper levels of nutrition. They could afford to eat well balanced meals. If you are poor, you're living off of whatever you can scrounge up or grow.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Yeah for sure they were also less likely to end up eating unclean food, involuntarily fall victim to the consequences of war, unable to escape famines (oft related to the former), and countless other such things. But in many ways I think this is a desirable bias. Because when we look at past vs present life expectancy, what we're mostly interested in, as far as these topics go, is how medical technology is improving things. The implied question is 'What would ones life expectancy be without modern medicine?' And the upper classes of times past basically answer this for us. The one thing we need to ensure is that we're not picking a literal survivorship bias. So for instance when looking all the way back to Ancient Greece one again finds an average age of death of about 70 years old. But many people point out that if Plato died when he was 20 instead of when he was 80, then we might never have heard of him. So the sample is somewhat biased. This is kind of true, but it's also true that nearly all of these people we would have known about if they died when 40, but anyhow this is all a really annoying and subjective debate - so things like the Founding Fathers are much nicer because there there's 0 argument of survivorship bias.

cogman10 2y ago

> the wealthy were no better off than the impoverished here Eh, in some ways but not all ways. The wealthy, for example, were much more likely to receive proper levels of nutrition. They could afford to eat well balanced meals. If you are poor, you're living off of whatever you can scrounge up or grow.

somenameforme 2y ago
Yeah for sure they were also less likely to end up eating unclean food, involuntarily fall victim to the consequences of war, unable to escape famines (oft related to the former), and countless other such things. But in many ways I think this is a desirable bias. Because when we look at past vs present life expectancy, what we're mostly interested in, as far as these topics go, is how medical technology is improving things. The implied question is 'What would ones life expectancy be without modern medicine?' And the upper classes of times past basically answer this for us. The one thing we need to ensure is that we're not picking a literal survivorship bias. So for instance when looking all the way back to Ancient Greece one again finds an average age of death of about 70 years old. But many people point out that if Plato died when he was 20 instead of when he was 80, then we might never have heard of him. So the sample is somewhat biased. This is kind of true, but it's also true that nearly all of these people we would have known about if they died when 40, but anyhow this is all a really annoying and subjective debate - so things like the Founding Fathers are much nicer because there there's 0 argument of survivorship bias.