You hear older people jokingly say that “Most people my age are dead.” (Example: Gary Player said it in Sports Illustrated.)
There has to be a first age at which this becomes correct. IOW, at age 50, or 60, or 70, half plus one of all the people born in that birth year have died.
What is that age in the U.S.? What is that age is other countries?
Would that not be considered a Yogi-ism?
Mathematically speaking, wouldn’t that come to be as soon as you lived past the ‘average life expectancy’?
77.8 years as of 2004 for the U.S.
If I’m reading this table right, it’s 78-79 for men, 83-84 for women in the U.S. Those are the ages at which the number of survivors per 100,000 person born alive is 50,000.
That’s how I read it.
Median life expectancy, not average.
It’s a good guide to the likely answer, but it’s only a guide. The answer will be different for different cohorts of people, because each group experiences different rates of mortality. The actual question being asked is really more along the lines of “For a given year of birth, how many years have to pass before half of the people born in that year have died?”. Those life tables are calculated using a hypothetical initial population of 100,000 and then applying the mortality rates actually experienced by the population in 2004 throughout the rest of their lives.
Ah, ok.
Along with being different for each birth year, wouldn’t it also be impossble to know what that age was until 1/2 of all the people born that year died?
Gee … I never had thoughts like this until I got past 45 …
45? Wait . . . at some point, you’ll have so many aches and pains, you’ll swear you’re in the already-dead majority.
Well both my parents are 84, and my dad commented that he was the last guy alive from his boot camp unit and that there was only one guy that served with him in his first unit left alive [he was a replacement that showed up halfway up the Ruhr section of the campaign. My mom’s older brother George is still alive at 96.
Oddly enough, barring accident or medical mischance, both sides of my family could be members of Heinlein’s Howard Families - we tend to live until our 90s and have a fair proportion that live to over 100. The only grandparent who died before the age of 90 was my maternal g’mother - she died in her 30s as a result of being burned badly in the same housefire that killed my mothers only sister. She lived for almost a year in the hospital from what I understand. My fathers Aunt Bessie was very active into her 90s [she and alice had a missionary couple in her powerboat on a picnic.] they got stuck for a number of hours when the tide went out, so they slogged through the mud until they could get to a phone … :eek: then went back to get the boat when the tide was going to come back in :eek:
“unitiated” - an intentional Yogi-ism?
Why break it down by gender? Why exclude people from other countries? “Most of the people” doesn’t specify a lot of exclusions.
Of course, you can go for “white men who live on the East Coast” if you really want to…
So to find this out you’d have to get the birth stats from the year you were born right.
For instance I was born in 1983 so let’s say 100,000 people were born that year.
Then you’d have to find out how many of those people born that year died before this current year 2008 right?
Or am I calculating this wrong?
Because there are significant differences in life expectancies across countries and between the sexes. There are other factors that influence life expectancy, but with those two you can make a reasonable guess.
The quote in the OP was actually made by Casey Stengel. The Ol’ Perfessor was hired at age 71 in 1962 to manage the hapless expansion New York Mets, and according to baseball lure, when a reporter asked him if he was not too old for the job, he answered: “Most people my age are dead at the present time, and you could look it up.”
As an aside, those interested in vintage Stengelese will want to read his hilarious 1958 testimony in front of the U.S. Senate.