Long story short, I can’t seem to find an easy year to year comparison of life expectancy (worldwide average) at birth numbers. I searched and other than going back through each world population data sheet it looks bleak.
Long story. My father and I are discussing several topics during milking and he states that he thinks the rate at which life expectancy is rising is slower than it was several decades ago. I’m not so sure about that. Anyone have numbers ?
The web page below has a PDF document of “Life Expectancy at Birth, by Race and Sex, Selected Years 1929-96” (for the USA) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm
Also make sure you are defining your terms. Since 100 years ago babies and children under 5 died more often than now it significantly lowered the life expectancy
1955- 46.4 worldwide. 66.0 developed world. 40.7 developing or undeveloped world.
1999 - 63.0 worldwide. 75.0 developed world. 62.0 developed or undeveloped world.
As you can see, most of the gains have been made in the poorer countries. This is mostly due to a sharp decline in infant mortality. I can’t find the infant mortality rate for 1955 but I’m guessing the worldwide rate was nearly 10%. By 1985 it was a little more than 1%. Now it’s somewhere around .7%. So your dad is probably right. Infant mortality was declining at an average of more than 300% every 10 years between 1955 and 1985. Only about 30% in the last 10 years.
Now I’ll just wait for someone to show me where I screwed up the math.
Thanks for the numbers so far.
The idea started as a discussion that intellectual progress, especially in scientific research as it relates to solving real world problems (lowering occurences of disease and starvation), has slowed. That is the reason I’m looking for worldwide numbers. Obviously there is more room for improvement in developing countries than in the industrialized nations. I suppose as the developing countries get closer in life expectancy to industrialized countries that the rate would slow. I also thought that the increase in life expectancy in industrialized nations would continue to bring the rates up.
Also note that AIDS is lowering average life expectancy significantly in many African countries.
I’d remembered reading some pretty scary statistics about this a few months ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so I did a quick web search. Here’s a CNN article from about a year ago - http://www-cgi.cnn.com/HEALTH/9903/18/aids.africa.02/ - about it that supposedly uses US Census Bureau data. The article includes a table of 21 countries whose life expectancy figures have dropped by ten or more years. Some of the worst examples:
Zimbabwe - 39 years down from 65
Botswana - 40 from 62
Zambia - 37 from 56
Without getting into the numbers themselves, it is quite probable that the rates have slowed simply based on the old 80/20 or 90/10 rules. (80 or 90 percent of your problems are solved with 20 or 10 percent of your effort; the remaining 20 or 10 percent of your problems are solved with 80 or 90 percent of your effort.)
Consider auto emissions. The effort to clean U.S. engines between 1963 and 1975 required a certain amount of effort that resulted in tremendous gains. Since that time, the car companies have spent far more energy and money trying to knock off small percentages of the remainder of the emissions.
Introduce antibiotics, clean water, and a few other aids and you knock off major causes of infant death. These are technical solutions that can be imposed by governments.
The remaining deaths are often related to nutrition. Nutrition is harder to guarantee because politics interferes with food distribution and because some of the effort requires levels of education of the mothers that is much more labor-intensive than simply getting hypodermics into the hands of medical personnel and building pumping stations with adequate filters and chlorination.
I have grossly oversimplified both the problems and the responses to them, of course.
Tom~
Infant mortality is always a major factor in life expectancy tables.
There probably hasn’t been much change in the individual year death rates (the chance of someone age 70 living to age 71, for instance) for some time. It’s not really that the tail end is lengthening, it’s that more people are living to age 5.
A human being is genetically “programmed” to live about 75-80 years. Sure, some live to be 100+, but there is an upper limit to how long a human being can live, even under ideal circumstances. And that upper limit probably hasn’t changed in thousands of years.
What HAS changed is that more and more of us in the modern world are able to reach that upper limit. Many of the diseases that would have killed us in infancy or childhood have been eradicated, and medicine can treat a host of injuries and maladies that would have killed others in the prime of life. Moreover, in the modern world, most of us don’t have to worry about starvation or attacks by wild animals.
But even if disease were eradicated, there would still be an upper limit to how long people can live. Most of the “easy” ailments have been fixed, which means life expectancy probably CAN’T increase much more in Europe and the USA.
Of course, if scientists find ways to alter the aging process (genetically or otherwise), all bets are off
Someone answered this for me about 2700 posts back.
How long people live has been about the same for centuries.
Only the average has changed.
There’s a difference between life expectancy and life span.
Life expectancy is how long the typical person lives, including infant mortality, disease, etc.
Life span is how long the human body will last before it just quits.
Life expectancy varies a lot, and is greater in industrial countries primarily because of prevention of disease and reduced infant mortality.
Life span has been fairly consistent, though research into aging may hold the key to opening this ground.