Life Expectancy Among European Scholars from the 16th to the Early 20th Century | Hacker News Reader

Life Expectancy Among European Scholars from the 16th to the Early 20th Century

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What I love about this is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that “we live way longer than our ancestors thanks to our progress in science”.

From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Take those away, and people 5 centuries ago lived roughly as long as today.

Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure, so that we roughly always die at the same age.

Was that ever in doubt? The median age of those who die from actual old age has been fairly constant for a very long time.

It's just that we're less likely to get eaten by predators or to die from wounds or disease when compared to our ancestors, while our ancestors didn't have to worry about plane crashes or traffic accidents (well, not to the extent we do anyway).

You missing child mortality here and the average poor farmer which will tell a different story.

I'm at the opposite conclusion to you.

You firstly say that improved life expectancy isn't due to science, then you say that two of the three main reasons for improved life expectancy are pandemics and childhood mortality.

Those two statements are inconsistent. Medical science is one of the main reasons why pandemics and childhood mortality are less of a problem. Germ theory of disease, vaccines, therapeutics, etc.

  "we roughly always die at the same age."

The paper's data doesn't support this.

Figure 4 shows life expectancy among elite men conditional on surviving until 30 was 57-63 for the first few centuries in the sample - irrespective of whether it was a war/non-war period or a period with a specific plague.

Nowadays it is much higher than this (late 70s?) for a much larger cross section of people (not just elite individuals).

I would attribute more of the decrease in child mortality to clean water and better nutrition. Vaccines played a negligible roll (diseases were already well past their peak when vaccines came out).

Clean water and better nutrition are direct results of scientific findings...

Clean water has become more consistent, but it was common in many areas historically. You see remnants of this for example NYC is exempted from water filtration requirements due to how clean their water source is.

Good nutrition was similarly common in many areas historically even without scientific understanding of nutrition.

The reason clean water became consistent is because science told us clean water is important and how to make clean water widely available. Nutrition became better because science allowed us to grow more food across more land more easily. Things like crop rotation, mechanization and fertilizers allowed less land to feed more people a better diet.

> The reason clean water became consistent is because science told us clean water is important and how to make clean water widely available.

Both of these long pre-date according resembling the scientific method of germ theory. We’ve known that dirty water makes you sick and how to filter it for so long that the first example of a functioning sewer system I know of is prehistoric[1]. And clean water was transported over hundreds of miles through Roman aqueducts. They didn’t do that for no reason.

[1] Mohenji-Daro https://indusrivervalleytechnology.weebly.com/the-sewer-syst....

"We" also believed that cholera was caused by miasma, not dirty water. It was science that got everyone on the page that clean water was important to prevent disease.

The Roman water system also included lead pipes which poisoned its citizens. Victorian London included elaborate systems to pump water that was 'clean' inasmuch as it didn't smell like the Thames, but it still killed hundreds of people before Jon Snow searched for evidence to support his contested theory that the cholera outbreak could be traced to use of a particular water point

There's a big difference between water that is nice to drink and water that doesn't contain harmful pathogens, and cities that had piped water for centuries stopped killing their inhabitants from water-borne infections when scientists figured out germs existed and could be killed

That cholera outbreak was notable because most of the city had clean drinking water. Which means their mitigation strategies largely worked even as they didn’t understand the root causes of cholera.

Also, Roman aqueduct water had minimal lead contamination due to the high flow rate, unfortunately they used lead for a huge range of different things like cups which got lead onto people’s mouth and hands while eating etc.

Are you aware that vaccines came out way over 200 years ago in Europe? And the technique was known for quite a bit longer in Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation#Origins

You can also look at some examples of people from ~2000 years ago, in Greece. For example:

    Plato: 80
    Archimedes: 75
    Marcus Aurelius: 58
    Ptolemy: 84
    Aristotle: 62
    Socrates: 71
    Seneca: 92
    Epicurus: 71

These names are out of the top of my head, ages checked on Wikipedia - seems to be quite in line with the average life expectancy today.

You are picking only people who's life work means they are remembered for 2000 years

That's surely going to be a huge source of bias, because obviously people who lived longer were more likely to have done enough to be remembered

There's probably some other bias here as well, because people doing intellectual work in those times probably had more privileges, more wealth, etc.

They're also going to be more male, meaning they didn't die in childbirth, a serious cause of death for women through most of history. And not males in warfare, a major cause of death for young men through most of history.

That's an unfair comparison, because these people all had a Mediterranean diet.

Yes OK, but the comparison interesting to me is how much did medicine help. If people lived to their 80 in those ancient times, just with some diet, then medicine is surely not giving us much of a longer live span today.

Without even take into consideration that Socrates and Seneca were essentially murdered, forced to commit suicide.

The average person lifespan would however included people who got born as slaves and lived as slaves their whole life. It would also include people who died as kids or young people. You are also excluding people who need to work physically to get enough food to keep healthy.

The original claim is about how long the average person lives. It is not about oldest people we have noted in history.

Lets keep in mind that only few, chosen ones could have lived a life of a scholar.

We also have to keep in mind that a lot of others would have died of unnatural causes like war. Scholars might be a good idea about how much of age expectancy is due to lifestyle compared with improvements in medicine.

yes, that is a survivorship bias.

They could tell ahead of time "This guy will live a long time; lets make them a scholar?" That seems doubtful.

Here are few factors that would enhance persons lifespan: access to clean water, shelter, nutrition, medicine, and not working in toxic or otherwise risky to your life environment.

And dodging simple infections that would have killed us. Dodging diabetes or what have you disease that we can now treat.

Modern medicine is a miracle and we're too jaded.

A few years ago there was this atlas obscura article about all the deaths in one region in britain over the course of a year. Quite a lot of people died after tripping and either being cut by their knives or just acquiring an open wound in a different way.

Then they die a few days later.

Maybe with some notion of natural aging, life expectancy is quite similar. But chances of getting there are way higher now.

Literally the first line of Dante's Inferno is "Midway upon the journey of our life", and we know that the story takes place in 1300, when Dante was 35 years old. (Although Dante himself died in malaria at 56.)

I don't know where this "in the Middle Ages you were considered old folk by the age of 30" myth comes from, but it has no right to exist. It's the history equivalent of the tongue map. Wrong but so widespread that even teachers believe it sometimes.

Actually, I got that backwards. His date of birth is unknown, and it was estimated from the Inferno. The real source the 70 year lifespan used for this estimation comes from is the Bible.

If I would have given birth to 10 kids, seen 5 of them die, and maybe just becoming a grandmother, I would consider myself old even if I only had lived for 35 years. I might live for another 35, but my strength, health and looks would definitely never be close to those of a person in the beginning of their child bearing age.

> From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality. Take those away, and people 5 centuries ago lived roughly as long as today.

What are your sources? And how do you remove the indirect influences of wars (less food, etc.) that might last for many decades from your data?

By the way, the average life span of a 30-year old man in England 500 years ago was around 50 years. It is now over 70.

Are you looking at the same graph I am? The average age of death is 59 in the 1600-1650 range and steadily increases to 76.9 in the >=1930 range. That's a significant improvement. Sure, 1600-1650 is a local minimum, but none of the other ranges have an average death >64.2. That seems like a pretty significant level of progress caused by the revolutions in science between 1650 and 1930.

Also medieval and a Renaissance scholars were by definition more “elite” than the average European of the day - it would make sense to compare their lifespan to those of similar socio-economic status today.

In many cities you can see that the lifespan increases with the average household income of the neighbourhood, and if you look at say, Monaco, one of the richest per-capita cities, the average life expectancy is 85 for men and 93 for women, over 20 years longer than the average European scholar.

Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance and certainly one of, if not the, best Latinist. His father was a priest, and so could not legally marry Erasmus' mother, who was apparently the father's housekeeper; they were not well-off. The parents died from the plague in 1483, and Erasmus was thereafter raised and educated by monks, whom he eventually joined out of poverty. He went on to become one of the most influential Latinists in history. There was a nobility during the Renaissance, but underneath that was a churning sea of social mobility that rewarded intelligence and capability.

How exactly this contradicts relationship between social class and lifespan?

The parent mentions the obviously dramatic impact of infant / child mortality rates. That would definitely apply to the 59 average you're referring to, it's a huge factor in that average.

An intentionally simple example of how dramatic it is:

Ten people, with 20% of them dying in childhood. Then reduce that to just one dying in childhood.

80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 50, 40, 2, 1 = 50.8 avg

Now drop the childhood deaths down to just one.

80, 75, 70, 65, 65, 60, 60, 50, 40, 1 = 56.6

You gained 5.8 years on life expectancy from cutting the rate in half. Now take us from 1650 childhood mortality rates, to affluent modern nations where it's eg 5 deaths per 1000 live births in a nation like Canada (and that's down by 75% from 20 per 1000, 50 years ago). I can only imagine how high the rate was 400 years ago, it would absolutely tank the average in an epic way.

Am I totally misunderstanding the study? Wouldn't this figures be only people who were scholars appointed on adulthood? That would exclude children.

I suppose that hinges on whether the parent was opening a broad point about life expectancy from the topic, or only talking about the adult scholars. I'm not sure which they intended, I was guessing based on their phrasing that they were targeting the broader notion of how it's commonly perceived that life expectancy has increased over that time.

Bill Gates for example routinely claims in interviews / discussions that there has been a massive gain in life expectancy (technically correct) and he'll claim that broadly (mostly false), dropping context on the fact that it's heavily caused by childhood mortality figures plunging. I've seen him do that numerous times over the years (usually he gets agitated when someone challenges him, moves into sarcastic mode, and points out the huge gains for the average person on life expectancy, which is partially bunk). It's a common point of intellectual dishonesty in the scientific & health establishment, because they want to pretend the life expectancy gains for adults have been far greater than they really have been (for their own self-interested reasons). I suspected the parent comment was riffing on that aspect, where it's a pushed point of quasi propaganda that life expectancy has soared for everyone.

From this paper that is specifically looking at scholars: "Fifth, because the scholars were not appointed until they reached young adulthood, our investigation was limited to adult mortality. The effects of shifts in infant and child mortality on the evolution of life expectancy were neglected."

Considering that life expectancy for a 30 year old man is around 79.3 in Germany 2018, and you're reading it to be 76.9 in 1930, that's far less change than I have ever heard anyone previously suggest.

First, 2.4 years on average is significant. Second, the scholarly average is for people who were on average 54 when appointed to their position. That means there is no childhood mortality or deaths below that age to bring the average down.

There have been gains but one has to see it in the context of health life expectancy which in the UK currently is about 63 years.

Modern medicine helps to extend life expectancy but often those last 10+ years are miserable clinging to life whereas in the past once you got, for example, a chronic heart disease you would not survive very long. The healthy life expectancy in the past can only be a guess but probably not that considerably lower for certain classes.

> From what I’ve seen, it’s in realty mostly due to less wars and pandemics, as well as decreased child mortality.

Is there an easy way to confirm that these improvements are independent of the progress of science?

The data in the article shows that life expectancy was significantly lower among European elites than it is now.

At 30, in the period they consider expected age of death was in the 60-70 range.

Now it's in the high 80s among ALL europeans in the region they consider, which seems like a pretty big difference.

"Seems like the amount of things we die from increased to match what we’re able to cure"

This is always going to be approximately true, unless we end up living forever somehow.

That's something that sounds like it makes sense but is flat-out wrong. See this graph (from the TFA): https://read.dukeupress.edu/view-large/figure/2454457/dem893...

A bit depressing that these lazy, swaggy, wrong hot takes are so often upvoted.

That's the same graph shown in the OP, with the scale expanded to make it look bigger?

Yes, TFA and OP mean the same thing.

I think it's fair to say the reduction in pandemics and child mortality can at least be partly attributed to our progress in medicine.

I find this chart [1] really interesting, it first reminds me of the "dreaded" 16th century that I had read about in Fernand Braudel's books about two decades ago, and a second thing, which I hadn't realised until now, is that things were even worse in the 17th century, at least that's what the data shows.

[1] https://read.dukeupress.edu/view-large/figure/2454457/dem893...

Do we have life expectancy by profession today. I think this would be something to know before selecting a major. Also increased of rates of diseases associated with that profession. Like I would think construction workers definitely live shorter lives, and are more prone to breaking bones. Apparently Monks live a long time, but I'm curious which profession has the shortest lives.

[EDIT]

Found this, which is not quite the same, but still interesting. Stats on Page 11.

Mortality by Occupation. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6384/cdc_6384_DS1.pdf

Hairdressers and Cosmetologists contract HIV

Clergy - Non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas

Parkinson’s disease - Teachers, except postsecondary

Physicians - Commit suicide

Roofers - Homicide...Apparently they push each other off the roof.

I think in such professions the average will be brought down significantly by occupational deaths.

My grandfather used to be a steel mill worker, he's currently 94 and full of energy, but he also has a few stories to tell of deaths at the workplace.

Afaik, the people in these occupations live shorter on average. Some do live long, but generally the conditions take toll on the body.

Construction workers are breathing in a lot of stuff you don't want to breathe. That's a slow killer.

A big part of life expectancy statistics includes infant mortality. If all adults live to age 100 yrs, but half of all babies born die, then the average life expectancy would be age 50 yrs. So sometimes it can be confusing to understand what is being said.

Correct. But infants are usually not scholars so irrelevant to this analysis.

Which uncommon infants are scholars?

very interesting! wondering is there any similar study on average people? did those european countries have birth & death register data that can be used to do such analysis?

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