Something I find extremely interesting is life expectancy. If you look back to the upper classes of old their life expectancy was extremely similar to those of today. So for instance in modern history, of the 15 key Founding Fathers, 7 lived to at least 80 years old: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, John Jay. John Adams himself lived to 90.

The youngest to die were Hamilton who died in a duel, and John Hancock who died of gout of an undocumented cause - it can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption. All the others lived into their 60s and 70s. So their overall life expectancy was pretty much the same as we have today. And this was long before vaccines or even us knowing that surgeons washing their hands before surgery was a good thing to do. It's the same as you go back further into history. A study [1] of all men of renown in Ancient Greece was 71.3, and that was from thousands of years ago!

The most primitive medical technology, antibiotics in particular, could have likely expanded these lives well beyond current day. So the idea here is not to just add more regulations to medicine or have people go to the hospital even more for preventative care but to start living healthier lives in general. Less crap food, more time outdoors, more exercise, less obesity, and so on. And these are things that the government should have been pushing all along.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

Regulations are usually about the absolute minimum, if you look at EU you can see that there are large discrepancies between countries despite being under the same regulations. You can't regulate your way into prosperity.

IMHO it's the culture that matters and distrust into science and institutions breeds bad culture.

Those things matter, but you are falling prey to selection bias. I would suggest looking into tue children, siblings, and perhaps wives / mothers of those founding fathers to get the full picture. Your physical fitness and diet play a crucial role. But without modern medicine and specifically vaccines, we rely on the age old technique of have many children, the strong / lucky ones survive. When people desire a natural state, i think thats fine, so long as they appreciate it means literally more people you know die young, including some of your children. Thats how nature has always worked.

Yes and no. The largest advances in life expectancy were in solving child mortality issues. In other words, when you hear things like "2000 years ago, the life expectancy was 25 years old", those averages are highly skewed by the large number of people who didn't make it to their 10th birthday. Meanwhile those who *did* make it that far tended to live not much less long than we do now.

In other words, for most of human history, once you hit a certain point you were about as likely to live as long as any other point. Obviously not considering outlier circumstances like periods of war or novel disease.

It's only been in recent decades where we're really starting to push beyond that, at least in the most developed of nations. This is due to growing ability to solve the issues that arise from living too long.

I completely agree with the initial part of your post. Childhood mortality reductions explain nearly all of the dramatic increases in life expectancy over time, and also is one of the best examples of how averages mislead. Some people have this impression of the past where people somehow just dropped dead at e.g. age 40 when in reality it was more like half were dropping dead before 10 and half were dropping dead after 70 resulting in an average age of mortality of around 40.

But I'm not sure I'm aware of any evidence for the latter part. Max life expectancy doesn't seem to be changing much at all, even over millennia (though obviously claims from long ago are impossible to objectively verify). This is far from an exhaustive search but the first thing that came to mind was to search for the longest lived people. [1] Of the 100 oldest women and 100 oldest men to have ever lived, only 4 of each are still alive today, and the most common nationality (and in fact the only nationality with more than 1 represented) is Brazil with 2 of the oldest men and 1 of the oldest women.

If we were pushing the bounds max life expectancy, then you'd generally expect to see a significant number of people breaking those records and - accordingly - still alive. In many ways it's kind of surprising that we're not even if we weren't making progress, since the total sample size of 'verified' peoples is increasing dramatically over time, so more people should be living longer (even if there is no change in max life expectancy) by chance/outlierdome alone. This to me is suggestive that we indeed be going in the opposite direction, though that's some extremely weak evidence of course.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...

The thing to look at is the shift of life expectancy at an older age, e.g. 65, and how that shifts over time. For instance: the UN has a dataset [1] demonstrating an improvement from roughly 12 years to roughly 16 years (i.e. total age 77 to 81) from 1950 to 2010.

[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...

Ah perhaps I misunderstood you. You're arguing that more people are reaching our 'expiration date' rather than that date meaningfully changing. That definitely seems true, but I think there's some very clear causal factors in play there (which that article doesn't hit on). Both smoking and drinking are on the decline which is going to send life expectancy at older ages way up.

And the various observations the article does make have similarly straight forward explanations. For instance gains have not been seen to the same degree in Eastern Europe where alcoholism, especially in the windows of time considered, was chronic. It also mentions dramatic gains in Asia but yet again you had things like China's Great Leap Forward and the Indonesian Genocide in the time frame studied where you were seeing deaths by the tens of millions. It's akin to saying that global life expectancy increased dramatically after 1945, which is certainly true.