Does anyone know of a source for actual life expectancies years ago.
You always here how that the life expectancy has increased over the decades, centuries, etc but those stats figure in babies.
A lot of babies in the old days died before there 5th birthday.
I wonder say if you took the average of those people who lived past say age 5 in 1800. How would that compare with life expectancy of today.
>> You always here how that the life expectancy has increased over the decades
That’s neither here nor there
>> A lot of babies in the old days died before there 5th birthday
That is also neither here nor there
A very large part of the increase in life expectancy at birth between 1800 and today results from the huge decrease in death rates of children under 6. So if you compared the life expectancies of six year olds in 1800 with the life expectancies of six year olds in 2000, the difference would be much smaller than the differences between life expectancies at birth in 1800 and 1900.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a child born in 1996 in the U.S. (either sex, any race) could expect to live 76.1 years (to 76.1) and a child six years old in 1996 could expect to live 70.8 years (to 76.8) – not much of a difference. In 1800, life expectancy at birth for Europeans (and probably for Europeans and person of European extraction living in the U.S.) was about 37 years. My SWAG would be that a European six years old in 1800 could expect to live about 50 more years, to about 56.
I couldn’t find any estimates of life expectancy at age six in the U.S. in 1800, but I did run across this estimate for ancient Romans:
life expectancy at birth, 25 years (to age 25)
life expectancy at age 5, 43 years (to age 48)
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Life.html
There are statistics on this… I’ve seen them all over. Try doing a search or something.
It gets depressing near the top.
Life expectancy (at 120 years): 3 months