Fantastic piece, thank you! I think we don't have a good understanding of these long-term slow demographic change in policy terms, and how they will alter our social world over time. We're only very slowly adapting pension and healthcare systems, for example.
Thank you very much! I agree. There are some ways demographers try to actually predict how life expectancy will change in the future, but they all depend on important assumptions and it's still hard to say what the future holds...
Statistics about mortality are useful for see the progress in heath nationally and globally and they can also you some idea about how long you can expect to live yourself, especially for a young person. However, it is also easy to overestimate how precise information you get from the statistics. For example, if you want to know the probability that your 75 year old parent is going to die in the next year, you can't just look up the probability that someone dies in their 75th year, since many of the people who will die at that age will already have been sick on their 75th birthday. The same is probably also true for 35 year olds. The shorter timeline you are considering, the more your current health influences the probability of surviving that amount of time.
Is there a better model to help you understand the probability of dying in the next year or next 5 years? I have seen some statistics about sudden death, but that does not take into account the probability of getting sick an dying in a relatively short amount of time.
Is it possible to have a follow-up looking at the related concepts of Healthy Life Expectancy or Disability Free Life Expectancy - whether the increase in life expectancy flows straight through into needs for social or health care, or whether the period needing such care changes little, while healthy life is where the increase is? This does inform people about decisions on retirement ages, for example.
1. Do you have data pre-1950 on death rates from difference causes (US)? I'm curious to know, especially for cardiovascular disease, what the trends look like prior to the rise in smoking and poor diet.
2. "It’s a common misconception that this gap is because men are more likely to face risks from accidents and violent deaths." I confess to holding this misconception, but I'm not sure I see clearly where it goes wrong. The gap in infancy is the most compelling data against it, but after that, it seems at all ages men engage in more risky behavior than women (accidents, violence, drug, tobacco, and substance abuse, etc.). As long as those risky behaviors are sufficiently risky to flirt with death, then I guess I'd expect that to be a cause in the life expectancy gap, no?
1. Thank you for pointing me to this data! That rise and fall for CVD, very interesting.
2. OK I think I follow now. I initially missed the point about relative impact at different age intervals, but your claim is explained well by the data.
Why does the chart show such a dramatic collapse of US life expectancy specifically when other countries on the list, such as France, were hit just as hard by Covid?
Fantastic piece, thank you! I think we don't have a good understanding of these long-term slow demographic change in policy terms, and how they will alter our social world over time. We're only very slowly adapting pension and healthcare systems, for example.
Thank you very much! I agree. There are some ways demographers try to actually predict how life expectancy will change in the future, but they all depend on important assumptions and it's still hard to say what the future holds...
Thanks for a great article!
Statistics about mortality are useful for see the progress in heath nationally and globally and they can also you some idea about how long you can expect to live yourself, especially for a young person. However, it is also easy to overestimate how precise information you get from the statistics. For example, if you want to know the probability that your 75 year old parent is going to die in the next year, you can't just look up the probability that someone dies in their 75th year, since many of the people who will die at that age will already have been sick on their 75th birthday. The same is probably also true for 35 year olds. The shorter timeline you are considering, the more your current health influences the probability of surviving that amount of time.
Is there a better model to help you understand the probability of dying in the next year or next 5 years? I have seen some statistics about sudden death, but that does not take into account the probability of getting sick an dying in a relatively short amount of time.
Is it possible to have a follow-up looking at the related concepts of Healthy Life Expectancy or Disability Free Life Expectancy - whether the increase in life expectancy flows straight through into needs for social or health care, or whether the period needing such care changes little, while healthy life is where the increase is? This does inform people about decisions on retirement ages, for example.
This is a useful and timely post, as life expectancy stagnation in the US has been in the news lately.
In addition to the factors you mention, unequal access to health care may be a problem. Can you point me to data on that?
Thank you! Agreed, I'll have a look and get back to you on this!
Your articles are so worth the time, thank you.
Two questions:
1. Do you have data pre-1950 on death rates from difference causes (US)? I'm curious to know, especially for cardiovascular disease, what the trends look like prior to the rise in smoking and poor diet.
2. "It’s a common misconception that this gap is because men are more likely to face risks from accidents and violent deaths." I confess to holding this misconception, but I'm not sure I see clearly where it goes wrong. The gap in infancy is the most compelling data against it, but after that, it seems at all ages men engage in more risky behavior than women (accidents, violence, drug, tobacco, and substance abuse, etc.). As long as those risky behaviors are sufficiently risky to flirt with death, then I guess I'd expect that to be a cause in the life expectancy gap, no?
Thank you very much :)
To answer your questions:
(1) Yes, there is data on pre-1950 death rates! The longest time series is here if you want to explore: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Age-adjusted-Death-Rates-for-Selected-Major-C/6rkc-nb2q/about_data The cardiovascular disease mortality trend looks like this: https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1744135652369952880?t=TSg-zXToKdVExjprJSrRmA&s=19 I also have it on my radar to add to OWID.
(2) On rereading, I think I misphrased that, I meant mortality differences in youth weren't the main cause of the sex gap in life expectancy.
If you check out this chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gender-gap-in-life-expectancy-by-age-group from the end of this article https://ourworldindata.org/why-do-women-live-longer-than-men you'll see that youth and young adulthood make a relatively small contribution to the overall sex gap, except during major events like the world wars.
1. Thank you for pointing me to this data! That rise and fall for CVD, very interesting.
2. OK I think I follow now. I initially missed the point about relative impact at different age intervals, but your claim is explained well by the data.
Thanks again for another illuminating post!
Thanks for a great read as always!
Thank you! :)
Wow! Thank you for the edification.
I hope to see the charts at OWID updated soon to show the 1+ year increase in US life expectancy in 2022. Good blog piece!
Why does the chart show such a dramatic collapse of US life expectancy specifically when other countries on the list, such as France, were hit just as hard by Covid?