Life expectancy is one of those funny measures with a cavernous gap between those who think they understand it and those who do.
The latest controversy arose a few days ago a year ago (this post has been in draft for a long time…) because Russia is planning to increase the normal retirement age from 60 to 65 for men by 2028 and 55 to 63 for women by 2034.
Russia propose raising retirement age above life expectancy
WHO puts life expectancy at birth at 66 for men and 77 for women. (as at 2016). Now you may already have noticed a terminology difference here.:
- “Life expectancy at birth” is a well defined term estimate the mean age at death of someone just born.
- “Life expectancy” without a modifier generally implies this as well, but can be misunderstood
- “Life expectancy given survival to age x” or “life expectancy by age x” is how long one is expected to live, given your current age x.
Problematically, terms to differentiate “remaining life expectancy” (the number of years remaining) and “total life expectancy” or “expected lifetime” (the total number of years expected to live including those already survived) are not used consistently.
Every day that you dodge death, your total life expectancy goes up. An 18 year old, with newly conferred adult status, will have a total life expectancy somewhere between 0 and 18 years higher than their life expectancy at birth, depending on how dangerous childhood was expected to have been in the calculation of the original life expectancy (at birth) calculation.
Progression of Life Expectancy at birth for almost all countries remains on an upwards trajectory
The World Bank has a useful interactive tool for plotting useful figures. Here is the progression of life expectancy at birth for a subset of countries.
There have been gains even in recent years (opposed to over hundreds of years, where the massive gains are widely accepted). The gains are not without interruption.
- South Africa, in particular, was hit by HIV/AIDS for many years. HIV/AIDS affects the mortality of babies and young children through mother to child transmission. This has a particularly potent impact on life expectancy at birth.
- Mortality improvements in the UK have slowed down dramatically in the last few years.
- Life expectancy in the US has actually gone backwards in recent years, partly linked to opioid abuse and suicide.
So what?
One of the reasons this blog post took ages to come out is after a bit of rambling I wasn’t sure what the conclusion is. This would need to be a much longer post to really cover any amount of the detail. However, perhaps this provide a tiny taste of the complexities involved with the terminology (ab)use and the actual numbers and drivers.