It’s the reason why so many misleading statistics claim a much shorter lifespan in the past. If you survived childhood, and there wasn’t a plague around, or a war, you had good chances of reaching 60.
Life expectancy from birth is easily the most misleading statistic in the history of the social sciences because it is a measure of central tendency (aka an average, specifically, a median) of a property (age at death) that not only has no central tendency but actually has the opposite of a central tendency, with values concentrated at the low end (infant and child mortality) and the high end (old age deaths). In almost all societies ever measured, the life expectancy from birth age is usually the age at which a person is least likely to die.
So many dead children. I count a full one third of all deaths being babies and toddlers.
It’s the reason why so many misleading statistics claim a much shorter lifespan in the past. If you survived childhood, and there wasn’t a plague around, or a war, you had good chances of reaching 60.
Life expectancy from birth is easily the most misleading statistic in the history of the social sciences because it is a measure of central tendency (aka an average, specifically, a median) of a property (age at death) that not only has no central tendency but actually has the opposite of a central tendency, with values concentrated at the low end (infant and child mortality) and the high end (old age deaths). In almost all societies ever measured, the life expectancy from birth age is usually the age at which a person is least likely to die.