Life expectancy of 53 does not usually mean nobody makes it to 60. In the early 1900s[1], life expectancy at birth in England was 53, but at the same time, as long as you survived until you were 20, your life expectancy had increased to over 60. If you lived to 50, you could expect to become 70.

https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Life-expectancy-...

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[1]: Not counting the years of the Spanish flu!

To the parents point, you sort of made their point. “If you made it to x”. By having fewer older members of their population they likely had few joint problems reported overall. I would expect any reasonable study to control for this variable but a survey would not.

Life expectancy is such a consistently deceptive measurement that I often wonder why it's not been replaced. Surely there must be more useful ways of quantifying lifespans, something like a "median age of currently living people"?

Point estimates in general are deceptive. It's difficult to capture the nuance of a full distribution with a single number.

I've had some luck with upper and lower percentiles, e.g. 5 % and 95 %. These cover 9 out of 10 people, which is large enough to be meaningful, yet not so small it's difficult to estimate.

This is probably because of child mortality etc.

I.e. the conclusion that people there don't usually live past 60 seems like a fallacy.

That is part of it, but there would also be things like high mortality during childbirth, and lack of antibiotics there at that time.

At the same time you have no car crashes or other post-industrial dangers.

But you also were much more likely to farm and hunt and do manual labor. All much more dangerous than office chair

Is that true? I thought there was evidence for setrong divisions of labour as soon as agriculture came along. That brings surplus and, with it, social stratification.

A lot more people used to farm as a percentage of the population. Even in the last century, especially in communist countries where pay was low. Small subsistence farmers were much more common. You might own a small plot, and some pigs, cows an even a horse. Or if really poor work on someone else's land. Just being around animals exposes you to many more dangers, like getting kicked or even infections from cleaning waste.

Reminder that "life expectancy" is a useless metric if you don't specify the base age. Life expectancy at birth, at 5 years, at 15 years?