Life expectancy at, say, age 25 would be much more interesting information. Expectancy at 0 years (that is plain average) gives only the information about children mortality.

There are a couple more charts in that vein at one of the pages the post links to: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-ab...

If you look at life expectancy difference for teens and young adults, seems like the main difference between the 1800s and today is that instead of dying at your late 40s/50s you die in your 70s/80s, which is very intuitive to me at least. This is when regular visits to the doctor become important. I wouldn't be surprised if heart issues alone is the main driver of this trend.

Even life expectancy at age 25 is mostly meaningless, actually. Women mortality (due to childbirth) took a significant toll on the average life expectancy as well. And another two significant scourges were famines and epidemics.

Well, if you take away all the mortality causes of the time you'll end up thinking things were pretty good back then, since people weren't dying in car crashes.

Yep, but life expectancy is not a very intuitive concept. When they read "life expectancy was 25 years", many people tend to think a 30 year old was some kind of lucky but senile guy back then. Dying of old age was just not the norm.

Dying of old age was a norm. There were plenty of old people way back when. It's just that lots of people dying young (well across all age groups) was the norm too.

Actually women delivery mortality became horribly bad with the invention of maternity hospitals and before the invention of sanitation.

I went down a rabbit whole and eventually stumbled upon this small webpage documenting changes from 1900 to 2000.

https://demography.cpc.unc.edu/2014/06/16/mortality-and-caus...

I also pulled up car accident fatalities and found it interesting that we peaked in the 30s and 40s per capita in the US, despite the major investment of the highway system in the 50s which one could have presumed would have made it far worse given the combination of speed and lack of air bags. Then again, my anecdotal experience says that I know far more people killed or severely injured from country driving and small town DUI than highway driving.

I wonder what the 2100 graph will say? Will that cancer chunk be eliminated or mostly scrunched down? Will we have figured out how to grow new hearts so we eliminate heart disease? Hope I live long enough to find out (I’d be 115).

Life expectancy is going to drop due to 150 million premature deaths from CO2 over the 21st century unless we can reduce CO2 emissions. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0108-y

And this says nothing about the direct and indirect deaths from rising sea levels: famine, wars, pandemics, etc.

Not a very honest paper title. "Quantified, localized health benefits of accelerated carbon dioxide emissions reductions". I lost a little more respect for Nature today. To call them premature deaths due to CO2 when they are really about other things that are emitted with the CO2 when burning fossil fuels, is deceptive.

From the article abstract:

"This generally reduces co-emissions that cause ambient air pollution, resulting in near-term, localized health benefits. We therefore examine the human health benefits of increasing 21st-century CO2 reductions by 180 GtC, an amount that would shift a ‘standard’ 2 °C scenario to 1.5 °C or could achieve 2 °C without negative emissions."

I did not read the article but the abstract emphasizes the number of lives saved in Asia and Africa. It is probably the reduction in burning coal without any scrubbers that gives the large reduction in deaths. Reducing natural gas power generation in the US would likely reduce few deaths.

I had written a similar post earlier but decided not to submit as I felt I must have been missing something. You articulated what I was attempting to say very well. Thank you!

This is really the story about the 99%, very rich people lived about as long in ancient times as they do now. Well, woman still died from giving birth.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181002-how-long-did-ancien...

For the rest of us though, life has become better and healthier.

It's a sobering fact that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

For others who would like to know: Mozart died at 35.

From Wikipedia:

The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died on 5 December 1791 at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death have attracted much research and speculation. Some principal sources of contention are as follows.

* Whether Mozart declined gradually, experiencing great fear and sadness, or whether he was fundamentally in good spirits toward the end of his life, then felled by a relatively sudden illness. The former hypothesis was accepted for most of the history of Mozart biography, but the latter has been advanced by contemporary scholars.

* The actual cause of his death: whether it was from disease or poisoning. The poisoning hypothesis is widely discredited. If a particular disease was the actual cause of death, then it remains unknown; only plausible conjectures can be offered.

* His funeral arrangements, and whether they were the normal procedures for his day, or if they were of a disrespectful nature. Modern scholarship generally supports the view that the funeral arrangements were normal for Mozart's time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wolfgang_Amadeus_Moza...

I've run across a number of not just anecdotal accounts of long longevity, good health and lack of disease in a number of different indigenous cultures. I get the uncomfortable feeling that we are persistently and myopically comparing ourselves to in terms of health and longevity (and happiness/satisfaction for that matter) to what has been essentially a pathological state of human existence in the newer civilizations of the last couple thousand years. And still in modern times the diseases of civilization are raging as hard as ever.

For a good example, read the description of the Crow Indians in the last appendix of Journal of A Trapper:

https://books.google.com/books?id=49HTAAAAMAAJ&printsec=fron...

The worse figures are in colonies that Europeans plundered for a century or more (India and Africa). Sadly neither numbers nor suffering is sufficient to wipe the century old propaganda that their thievery was 'benign civilization'.

Sad.

An interesting graphic would be life expectancy in US per state, is there one?

Not sure about a graphic but this information is available in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

These articles always frustrate the crap out of me as "life expectancy" isn't the right metric; While living longer we tend to be sick (both physical and mental) longer. Just think of the fact that we've seen an increase in the amount of "confused people" and even hotlines to report those;

Getting overstimulated by shocking videos/news outlets on our phones, feeling ousted/depressed by seeing other people pretend to have happy lives on social media or seeing marketing from websites pretending its perfectly normal to play with each others feelings by having affairs.

I'll take it.

I'm female. I happily have zero children at age 40. I'm able to be as open about my bisexuality and my atheism as I chose. In my life, I've had 2 fairly superficial cuts get infected - one was about 3 weeks ago, and accompanied a fall down the stairs. I also got a broken arm (elbow) out of the deal. The other was years ago, and had red streaks going up my thumb.

These infections alone could have killed me. I probably could not have chosen to marry my spouse. I probably could not have chosen to be atheist and could not have openly been attracted to women as well as men. I'd have been expected to do womanly things and not rightfully been able to do things like rent an apartment, work and expect to keep my earnings as my own, and other such things. In many places, I could not vote either.

My ex husband wound up being severely mentally ill. He would have gotten treated horribly if not experimented on. Mental hospitals can be horrible places now, yet they were houses of horrors back in the day.

It is really difficult to compare being older yet sicker to days of the past as well, since some things would have simply killed you instead of being something you live with as a chronic disease. Type 1 diabetes - the sort that affects young folks - killed more often. Type 2 could easily do so as well. Heart attack? No treatments available, though you might be lucky enough to live through it. Stroke? Same thing, and then you are at the mercy of your children and family to take care of you (sometimes it is that way now, depending on where in the world you live).

Meh. I'll take now, thank you very much.

>These infections alone could have killed me.

I am a bit bothered by such statements. Bodies actually can go a long long way before dying.

Broken bones can heal on their own for most simple fractures. It wouldve taken months, would've hurt more, might not have been be perfectly aligned, you might limp your whole life, but it works. (And more complex ones can also be difficult or impossible to heal even with modern help.)

As for infections, even though it can go both ways, we can actually heal or at least fight them quite efficiently (if in sufficient health). Abscess, fistula, we have many ways of fighting back or curb infections. It's way more comfortable to skip a week of fever or annoying swelling though, with the perk of approximately guaranteed survival. (Also amputation is a rather ancient technique and can help a lot.)

Even in this day many people can't or don't afford surgery or medication and still manage to survive wounds.

The most recent one was more superficial, and likely would have been fine. I have a fairly conservative doctor who doesn't tend to prescribe anything if a bit of time will work. The thumb, though: It needed antibiotics on top of being lanced (I wound up at urgent care) as the worry was that it was entering the bloodstream - the red streaks were a warning sign. That one was more likely to have killed me at some point. Folks died quite often from infection. An infected tooth can kill: Same for infection after childbirth. Sure, they can go both ways and the body takes care of things until it doesn't.

My broken bone would have been fine, but folks died of this stuff as well. They would list cause of death as the accident rather than the infection due to lack of knowledge. Compound fractures were more likely to kill.

Even in this day many people can't or don't afford surgery or medication and still manage to survive wounds.

This is true, but people will do some self-care for wounds. Can't afford stitches, but can clean the wound well and use the bandage strips on it and continue to keep it clean. People didn't always do these things and some of the things we did were just wrong, simply for not understanding microbiology.

I think her point was a lot of things could kill you but are rather trivial to deal with now with medical care. Not that every sort of infection or illness is a death sentence without modern medicine.

>I am a bit bothered by such statements. Bodies actually can go a long long way before dying.

Yeah, they can. And yet at the same time life is fragile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage survived a railroad spike in the head at a time where that pretty much would have killed 999 out of 1,000 people.

And perfectly healthy people died by the truckload from the Spanish flu, and influenzas that hit healthy people the hardest because of cytokine storms.

People survived horrific illnesses and injuries throughout the ages and soldiered on. And plenty of people died along the way from those same hardships.

Your comment is the perfect illustration of exactly the issues that you complain about. You make sweeping claims without citations that are meant to invoke a deep sense that despite data showing otherwise that life is getting worse. Consider that you are part of the problem.

Ouch man; no need to make this personal. Thanks for agreeing with me though. Here you go;

14% increase of confused people (dutch) ; https://demonitor.kro-ncrv.nl/onderzoeken/verwarde-mensen

Living longer but sick longer; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/life-expectancy-a...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/prepare-for-a-sick-old-age...

TED talk about children getting overstimulated by Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w

fwiw “confused” isn’t an appropriate word for mentally ill in english.

I had some doubts about using that word but people don't necessarily need to be "ill"; Your average Joe is able to "snap" (let alone be confused about life or have a momentary mental breakdown) too. Being mentally ill on the other hand is stating its there for a longer period. (e.g days/months/lifetime).