He was also President for a very short time.
Gore has aged, no doubt about it, but Bush looks one hell of a lot older, and the age difference between them is quite small.
Can I nitpick here, and point out that the word “urban” is completely unnecessary in the OP? It’s misused in fact. Thanks. End of grammar hijack.
glad you found it interesting.
These are all fair points. As far as I can tell from the article (not being an actuary and all), it’s life expectancy at birth. And I certainly agree that candidates for presidency are already culled for reasonably healthy people who can withstand the rigours of campaigning. Both of those points suggest that my plus/minus ratings are a bit too generous.
However, I do think that my analysis is a bit more rigourous than the pundits looking at before and after pictures and saying, “wow - he’s aged a lot in eight years” - well yeah, and so have I, and so have you… 
In fact, this point may go the other way - given the quality of the health care, perhaps being President is good for your health?
No argument here.
To go even further, if the stresses associated with the job do not, in fact, have a significant impact on health, then this would certainly be the case.
Well, the White House is in Washington, D.C., isn’t it? 
Let’s use the First Ladies as a comparison…have they aged on par with their husbands? I would submit no…Laura Bush looks pretty much the same, and Hillary, I think has gotten older (the bags under her eyes are getting more and more pronounced) but I think that’s more her Senate seat and run for President.
Well…but women and men age so differently, especially with access to facials and makeup people. (Okay, so the men also have access to those things, but the poor things also have all that testosterone mucking things up, and they’re less likely to avail themselves of youthening techniques, I’d think.)
To be more precise, life expectancy at birth includes the possibility of all those types of death. Also, in terms of life expectancy, anyone who’s running for President has already gotten past *all *(not “a lot of”) those situations that could have resulted in his death.
What you need isn’t life expectancy at birth but life expectancy at the age that the President took office.
He’s gotten past those specific situations I listed, but those were just examples. He hasn’t gotten past all of the situations that can cause death, because someone who’s managed that is immortal.
Yes, but that makes it harder to compare, since each president is a different age on assuming the office. So I’m working off of the assumption that life expectancy doesn’t change much in adulthood, until you start getting into old age.
JFK was in poor health during his campaign and presidency. Now I’m wondering how long he would have lived if he hadn’t been assassinated.
Bad assumption.
Here are some numbers from the U.S. Social Security Period Life Table, 2004, showing Male Life Expectancy at various ages:
Age 20: 55.88
Age 30: 46.58
Age 40: 37.28
Age 50: 28.46
Age 60: 20.36
Age 65: 16.67
Age 70: 13.27
The historian Richard Reeves, in his excellent President Kennedy, thoroughly reviewed JFK’s health and medical records. He concluded that Kennedy’s life was not in any particular danger from his various maladies and that he might still have lived a long time, but that without additional surgery, his bad back might have confined him to a wheelchair within a few years’ time. Kennedy was adamant that he could not campaign for reelection in 1964 from a wheelchair, but with daily physical therapy and frequent injections of a drug cocktail (the exact contents of which still aren’t fully known) directly into his spine, he still suffered from severe and chronic back pain at the time of his death.
:smack: I left out a column, namely, age at death:
Age 20: 55.88 75.88
Age 30: 46.58 76.58
Age 40: 37.28 77.28
Age 50: 28.46 78.46
Age 60: 20.36 80.36
Age 65: 16.67 81.67
Age 70: 13.27 83.27
Not a huge difference in the age range at which Presidents first took office.
I’ll give this to Chronos. (Still, it took be taken into account in determining whether Presidents age more quickly while in office.)
And, although the numbers are as of 2004, it seems reasonable to assume that, even with increases in longevity, the overall pattern would have been similar in the past century.
ego sum non dignus.
I took the OP to be asking if being President ages the incumbent more than would be expected, and that the talking heads were just showing before and after pictures to make this point.
My reaction to the talking heads is that there must be a more objective way to analyze the issue. Most presidents are in their later forties or fifties when they get elected - that happens to be a stage in one’s life when there are signs of aging, more than at other times (e.g. - grey hair starts to show, which can have a dramatic effect on one’s appearence.) Just basing the theory on appearence, without a comparison to others of the same group, doesn’t seem very effective.
If the presidency does age the incumbent, I would expect it to show up in how long they live after the presidency, compared to their cohort. A key problem, as other posters have pointed out, is defining the appropriate comparator group.
Unfortunately, I have neither the professional ability, nor the access to the necessary types of data, to do anything more than a back of the envelope review.