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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Wow! Thank you for the edification.
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?
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?
Thanks for a great read as always!
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!
Great article!
"To me, one of them is that longevity isn’t one obscure problem that needs to be ‘cracked’ in order for us to live longer."
Isn't the "longevity problem" about the rectangularization of survival rates? (https://www.kitces.com/blog/squaring-the-survival-curve-and-what-it-means-for-retirement-planning/) We're only approaching the ~115 limit in life expectancy in such a linear fashion because we're putting exponentially more resources into healthcare.