there's definitely an increase but I think the early data is skewed by including infant mortality, although thats still important it sort of covered in separate metrics.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/)
Ya I've always seen the adjusted numbers closer to 50 before the 1900s
Also the entire world had a LOT more wars going on before we started bundling them together into World Wars
Yes wars are more frequent, but the biggest killers were viral and bacterial infections. Wars facilitated the spread thereof, but on the whole people still died more in peacetime. Vaccines and antibiotics were the real game changers in life expectancy as a lot of diseases became preventable.
Also, just to chime in to avoid confusion.
When there were many smaller wars, while the majority of those wars resulted in little casualties as a total of population, wars that THOROUGHLY devastated a population were much more common and more deadly.
For instance, people like to talk about the Soviets losing 12-17% of their population depending on the count in WW2, but some other countries suffered far worse in other wars.
Prussia lost 70% of their population in the 7 Years War. Saxony, the main front of the 30 Years War lost 90% of it's population. Rome in the Second Punic War lost in the first three years of the war 15-30% of it's total population in combat alone (60% of all adult men in the country), the war continued for 17 more years with less combat casualties but way more civilian losses.
Warfare is deadly, regardless of weapons. Despite the fact that our capacity to kill has gone up, people's willingness to slaughter has gone lower and lower over time in history.
Every time anyone posts "lifespan" data across a large timeline like this they think "oh, people only lived until they were 35!" and it drives me crazy.
Your source shows pre-Victorian life expectancy starting at age 15, excluding any violent deaths.
That’s ruling out a lot more than just infant mortality.
Infants are human. Their lifespan is included in the average because the average lifespan includes all humans in a group. Removing them skews the data.
What we need is better education, so that people don’t see an *average* and assume that people just dropped dead at 35.
Yes of course, but we see infant mortality graphs separately used to illustrate progress in that, which we have had a lot of, so it needs separating from average lifespan which is used more to determine how good an adult has it and how our medical technology or other factors has influenced survival from adult diseases.
But average lifespan is still average lifespan. Average lifespan is used to track a large variety of things, including infant mortality rates. A glance at this graph and I can tell you when the Sanitation Movement began, when vaccines were rolled out, and when antibiotics became available to the general public - and the people who benefitted most from those things were infants.
What you’re describing is average lifespan of those who survive infancy.
That’s a different graph altogether. And it’s valid, too, but it’s *not* “average lifespan”, which by definition *must* include infants.
Yes true, but its more informative to then separate out infant mortality and life span after infancy, now you know what contributing to the differences, and where there's still work to do. As infant mortality has a large effect on the average, but relates only to specific aspects that have improved, it makes more sense to put the average lifespan into context with the separated data, if you have it.
Otherwise, we could hypothesise that the graphs already showing decline in infant mortality are really just telling us the same story as the graph of the increasing lifespan, so we then need to check whether that is all the cause of the increase in average lifespan due to the very young age of most deaths. Edit to add.
Yeah except for women, not much. Women I would guess had a second infant-like period of high mortality due to child birth, and hygiene and other medical advances and improved nutrition has helped there a lot.
It's extremely difficult to increase life expectancy beyond peak reproductive years due to the selection shadow. Our bodies did not evolve to live much past the years when we reproduce the most.
It's extremely difficult to increase life expectancy beyond peak reproductive years due to the selection shadow. Our bodies did not evolve to live much past the years when we reproduce the most.
I wish these damn graphs would cut out infant and child mortality. If you threshold out the children, average lifespan has been pretty long for a long time. You can see almost all of the gains have been for children. We're not communicating that old people are living significantly longer, because that's mostly not what's happening.
This graph shouldn't be titled "average male lifespan", because that's misleading even though it's technically factual.
Edit: u/Smooth_Imagination posted a fantastic link below that shows we haven't really changed adult mortality much at all since antiquity. These graphs are so dishonest.
Correct. The biggest jumps not childhood mortality-related has been in women beginning at age 15. I'll have to try and dig up the link to the study, but due to childbirth/overall maternal mortality rates, women had life expectancies of only about 60 in early Victorian England vs nearly 80 today.
If I can find the study I'll link it or make a post.
Childhood mortality.
Before 1800 almost half of all children in the US died before the age of five. By the 1940s and 50s we'd gotten it down to around 50 kids per 1000. Now it's less than six or seven dead kids per 1000.
Most of the graphs here are somehow graphing childhood mortality.
Yup, flip the graph upside down with the top being 50% and the bottom being 0% and you have a graph of childhood mortality. The interesting thing is, even back in ancient times, if you made it to 5 years old, there was a good chance you'd see your 60's.
My guess: mostly because the data points are just one per decade, so these events are averaged out. I also guess that these periods of war were accompanied by increases in medical knowledge and technology that were driven by the wars themselves, so that the years following saw greater jumps in civilian life expectancy. I noticed the rapid uptick after the US Civil War specifically. All of a sudden there were people who had treated hundreds or thousands of trauma victims (not to mention the attendant disease outbreaks) and could actually learn on-the-job from a large scale dataset, in person. Again, totally a guess but I think that it is true that the Civil War and both World Wars actually did drive medical innovation forward.
Probably because the data is complete horse shit, as are most of the posts on this sub.
The line is perfectly flat at *precisely* 35 for 200 years (I.e., half the time axis). I'm sure that's accurate and very informative.
Meme sub full of meme people. Y'all need to get serious
Comedy and satire are fantastic ways of getting a message across. Being straightforward is rather bland and uninteresting.
Even if I'm hated, at least I'm striking controversy and riling people up. Being notorious is better than being nobody.
It's because the tracked census data used from ~1850 onwards didn't exist before the census data existed, so the average lifespan had to be calculated via extrapolation based on archeological data, which determined the 35 year average as being fairly consistent going back to antiquity. Yes there would be local variations from major events such as the 30 years war in the early 17th century, or the Black Death, but if you expand that to worldwide estimates, the impact from those events would be much reduced. What the graph is showing is the miracle of evidence based medicine.
Hey, don't forget it's also really good at trying to convince people that the fight against climate change is going really well actually, no no don't look at the weather outside, tech is gonna save us any day now...
Better would be data of life expectancy at 18 or at 60. Interestingly, life expectancy at 60 in UK was rather flat till like 1970 and it is rising since.
"Average" lifespan is a really misleading way of displaying age related data.
From the 1900's on, it isn't that men are living longer but fewer males are dying younger.
It's true that this is just a metric of childhood mortality. But I think reducing childhood mortality is pretty sweet too! That's definitely something to be optimistic about.
The data is pretty bad, doesn’t reflect much of anything like WW1 2.15 percent of the global population died primarily men, and I suspect had an impact on life expectancy from war and results from it.
While this graph might be flawed, it is another good reason to not hate divorces.
"Till death do you part" went from 20 years to 80 years (ish)
So it's okay if you didn't get it right in your 20s and don't want to spend the next half century with this person. They didn't even have that choice 150 years ago. Modern problems require modern solutions!
This is awesome and shuld shut the doomers up. Of course, hardcore doomers don't like facts (or people,) so they will moan or yell louder
However, charts like this can help counter foreign disinformation and also redirect a lot of those on the edges of the doomer cults back to civilization
Average lifespan is basically just a metric of childhood/infant mortality. If you take out the birth-related deaths (which are essentially zeroes that will tank an average) you would see a very different picture.
there's definitely an increase but I think the early data is skewed by including infant mortality, although thats still important it sort of covered in separate metrics. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/)
Ya I've always seen the adjusted numbers closer to 50 before the 1900s Also the entire world had a LOT more wars going on before we started bundling them together into World Wars
Yes wars are more frequent, but the biggest killers were viral and bacterial infections. Wars facilitated the spread thereof, but on the whole people still died more in peacetime. Vaccines and antibiotics were the real game changers in life expectancy as a lot of diseases became preventable.
Even during times of war, fatalities from disease wry often greatly outnumbered fatalities from actual fighting.
Save lives by bundling wars. A wundle if you will.
Also, just to chime in to avoid confusion. When there were many smaller wars, while the majority of those wars resulted in little casualties as a total of population, wars that THOROUGHLY devastated a population were much more common and more deadly. For instance, people like to talk about the Soviets losing 12-17% of their population depending on the count in WW2, but some other countries suffered far worse in other wars. Prussia lost 70% of their population in the 7 Years War. Saxony, the main front of the 30 Years War lost 90% of it's population. Rome in the Second Punic War lost in the first three years of the war 15-30% of it's total population in combat alone (60% of all adult men in the country), the war continued for 17 more years with less combat casualties but way more civilian losses. Warfare is deadly, regardless of weapons. Despite the fact that our capacity to kill has gone up, people's willingness to slaughter has gone lower and lower over time in history.
Every time anyone posts "lifespan" data across a large timeline like this they think "oh, people only lived until they were 35!" and it drives me crazy.
This should read “life expectancy” not “span”. Then at least the data would be more accurate.
Your source shows pre-Victorian life expectancy starting at age 15, excluding any violent deaths. That’s ruling out a lot more than just infant mortality.
Not to mention the much higher rates of work related injuries and war.
Infants are human. Their lifespan is included in the average because the average lifespan includes all humans in a group. Removing them skews the data. What we need is better education, so that people don’t see an *average* and assume that people just dropped dead at 35.
Yes of course, but we see infant mortality graphs separately used to illustrate progress in that, which we have had a lot of, so it needs separating from average lifespan which is used more to determine how good an adult has it and how our medical technology or other factors has influenced survival from adult diseases.
But average lifespan is still average lifespan. Average lifespan is used to track a large variety of things, including infant mortality rates. A glance at this graph and I can tell you when the Sanitation Movement began, when vaccines were rolled out, and when antibiotics became available to the general public - and the people who benefitted most from those things were infants. What you’re describing is average lifespan of those who survive infancy. That’s a different graph altogether. And it’s valid, too, but it’s *not* “average lifespan”, which by definition *must* include infants.
Yes true, but its more informative to then separate out infant mortality and life span after infancy, now you know what contributing to the differences, and where there's still work to do. As infant mortality has a large effect on the average, but relates only to specific aspects that have improved, it makes more sense to put the average lifespan into context with the separated data, if you have it. Otherwise, we could hypothesise that the graphs already showing decline in infant mortality are really just telling us the same story as the graph of the increasing lifespan, so we then need to check whether that is all the cause of the increase in average lifespan due to the very young age of most deaths. Edit to add.
This is a fantastic source. We really haven't moved the needle at all for adults.
Yeah except for women, not much. Women I would guess had a second infant-like period of high mortality due to child birth, and hygiene and other medical advances and improved nutrition has helped there a lot.
20-30 years or longer depending on the country feels like it's moving the needle
It's extremely difficult to increase life expectancy beyond peak reproductive years due to the selection shadow. Our bodies did not evolve to live much past the years when we reproduce the most.
It's extremely difficult to increase life expectancy beyond peak reproductive years due to the selection shadow. Our bodies did not evolve to live much past the years when we reproduce the most.
Why isn't there a drop around 1917 and 1945?
More interesting to me is the jump around the 1890s. What’s happening? Which males are these? In what region?
Pasteurization baby
You pasteurize babies?
You don't?
No…. Adulting is hard!
I wish these damn graphs would cut out infant and child mortality. If you threshold out the children, average lifespan has been pretty long for a long time. You can see almost all of the gains have been for children. We're not communicating that old people are living significantly longer, because that's mostly not what's happening. This graph shouldn't be titled "average male lifespan", because that's misleading even though it's technically factual. Edit: u/Smooth_Imagination posted a fantastic link below that shows we haven't really changed adult mortality much at all since antiquity. These graphs are so dishonest.
Correct. The biggest jumps not childhood mortality-related has been in women beginning at age 15. I'll have to try and dig up the link to the study, but due to childbirth/overall maternal mortality rates, women had life expectancies of only about 60 in early Victorian England vs nearly 80 today. If I can find the study I'll link it or make a post.
Those factories aren't gonna work themselves 🤷♂️
Childhood mortality. Before 1800 almost half of all children in the US died before the age of five. By the 1940s and 50s we'd gotten it down to around 50 kids per 1000. Now it's less than six or seven dead kids per 1000. Most of the graphs here are somehow graphing childhood mortality.
Yup, flip the graph upside down with the top being 50% and the bottom being 0% and you have a graph of childhood mortality. The interesting thing is, even back in ancient times, if you made it to 5 years old, there was a good chance you'd see your 60's.
My guess: mostly because the data points are just one per decade, so these events are averaged out. I also guess that these periods of war were accompanied by increases in medical knowledge and technology that were driven by the wars themselves, so that the years following saw greater jumps in civilian life expectancy. I noticed the rapid uptick after the US Civil War specifically. All of a sudden there were people who had treated hundreds or thousands of trauma victims (not to mention the attendant disease outbreaks) and could actually learn on-the-job from a large scale dataset, in person. Again, totally a guess but I think that it is true that the Civil War and both World Wars actually did drive medical innovation forward.
Probably because the data is complete horse shit, as are most of the posts on this sub. The line is perfectly flat at *precisely* 35 for 200 years (I.e., half the time axis). I'm sure that's accurate and very informative. Meme sub full of meme people. Y'all need to get serious
Yes, but don’t be a dick about it Edit: just saw your user name, never mind, I guess it’s kind of your MO
Comedy and satire are fantastic ways of getting a message across. Being straightforward is rather bland and uninteresting. Even if I'm hated, at least I'm striking controversy and riling people up. Being notorious is better than being nobody.
You should try comedy or satire then
But your comment was neither funny nor skillfully satirical, and besides, neither requires being a dick
>[But your comment was neither funny nor skillfully satirical](https://c.tenor.com/7j3cvrEv18gAAAAC/tenor.gif)
It's because the tracked census data used from ~1850 onwards didn't exist before the census data existed, so the average lifespan had to be calculated via extrapolation based on archeological data, which determined the 35 year average as being fairly consistent going back to antiquity. Yes there would be local variations from major events such as the 30 years war in the early 17th century, or the Black Death, but if you expand that to worldwide estimates, the impact from those events would be much reduced. What the graph is showing is the miracle of evidence based medicine.
The point of this subreddit is to justify over consumption as both good and virtuous. Not to actually be optimistic about the future
Correct, without reservation.
Hey, don't forget it's also really good at trying to convince people that the fight against climate change is going really well actually, no no don't look at the weather outside, tech is gonna save us any day now...
The infant/child mortality rate declining probably made it negligible
Better would be data of life expectancy at 18 or at 60. Interestingly, life expectancy at 60 in UK was rather flat till like 1970 and it is rising since.
"Average" lifespan is a really misleading way of displaying age related data. From the 1900's on, it isn't that men are living longer but fewer males are dying younger.
Genuinely good news — but check out the discussion in the original post. Not enough context on the location, data sources, etc.
It's true that this is just a metric of childhood mortality. But I think reducing childhood mortality is pretty sweet too! That's definitely something to be optimistic about.
Yah I love having 80 year old frat boys rule the world.
Capitalism is evil, growth is a cancer, free trade is exploitative. We should all become vegan hunter-gatherers and not have access to medicine!
The people who say this unironically temd to change the we to others
Hey guys, let me singlehandedly raise the average 😎
This data cannot be true. Not even a blip for the millions that died between 1936 and 1945? Doubt.
As I commented in the original post… while I understand scales like and realize they do serve a purpose… the surface level me really hates them.
Now show male sewerside rates lol
The data is pretty bad, doesn’t reflect much of anything like WW1 2.15 percent of the global population died primarily men, and I suspect had an impact on life expectancy from war and results from it.
While this graph might be flawed, it is another good reason to not hate divorces. "Till death do you part" went from 20 years to 80 years (ish) So it's okay if you didn't get it right in your 20s and don't want to spend the next half century with this person. They didn't even have that choice 150 years ago. Modern problems require modern solutions!
is there one for females?
This is awesome and shuld shut the doomers up. Of course, hardcore doomers don't like facts (or people,) so they will moan or yell louder However, charts like this can help counter foreign disinformation and also redirect a lot of those on the edges of the doomer cults back to civilization
I think our overlords are starting to reverse that trend as our retirement needs are starting to eat into their numbers that must only ever go up
Infant mortality? Was a much bigger deal back then.
Why no drop for WW2? Didn’t 18 million or so Soviets die?
When you get past age 15 or something the life expectancy is basically the same as it always was
Average lifespan is basically just a metric of childhood/infant mortality. If you take out the birth-related deaths (which are essentially zeroes that will tank an average) you would see a very different picture.
>Confuses centuries and decades >Doesn't say what country this is about Instant downvote.
I too like inaccurate graphs
Take me back.😫 Like I WANT to work till I'm 80 years old.
I was born in 1962 and according to the chart I should already be dead
It says "average"