No, that's completely wrong and this is a lie that keeps being repeated. Life expectancy has only been increasing because child mortality has decreased to almost zero. The upper end has not shifted much at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
and
"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Someone then replied with data showing that life expectancy is getting longer even setting aside infant mortality, to which you replied that the difference was that reduced mortality at age 60 adds mostly unproductive years, while reduced mortality at age 0-1 adds mostly productive years.
My question was how that has any bearing on the question in this thread of whether or not people are living longer? It wasn't clear to me at least without more info. Or maybe it was just an unrelated tangent. But that lack of clarity is why I asked.
Like, it’s distasteful and I hate it and it’s one of the reasons I hate capitalism.
Your worth is your labor. Nothing more.
"You've stopped contributing to the economy, it's time for you to die now" is a disgusting attitude that we should not tolerate as a society.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
> On average across all population subgroups, people who survived to age 50 were expected to live over 8 years longer in 2000 than in 1940, corresponding to an increase in e50 from 23 years in 1940 to 31.3 years in 2006, or an average rise of 1.3 years per decade.
An 8 year increase in life expectancy at age 50 (from 73 to 81.3) seems like a pretty large increase over the span of 60 years.
I’d be more interested to know what the change in healthspan is, though. Living longer is less interesting to me than living longer in good health without worsening pain and disability.
For example, this study reported on in 2018:
The researchers looked at birth and death data for people above age 65 from 1960-2010. They found that the average age of death in those who live to be older than 65 increased by three years in every 25-year period, which means that people can expect to live about six years longer than their grandparents, on average.
Furthermore, this trend continued at a relatively stable pace over the entire 50-year period and in all 20 countries that they analyzed. Factors like medical breakthroughs caused minor fluctuations in how quickly lifespans increased, but these variations averaged out over time
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/11/06/lifespan-increasing-peo...
The problem is making it to adulthood wasn't straight forward. Until the 20th century, your likelihood to make it to adulthood was only 50/50. There even if you made it out of infancy, child labor, disease, food affordability, etc., were all major causes of death. Making it to adulthood meant that you were lucky or privileged.
Now for calculating retirement ages for individuals who were adults when they started working, sure, the life expectancy has basically been flat. Maybe a few years of uptick, but nothing substantial like it seems looking at the overall stats of going from 45 to 75.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
A change of five to eight years makes a material difference in actuarial terms when you have to plan for retirement:
> In 1920–1922, Canadian men who had lived to age 65 could expect to live for 13 more years, and women could expect to live for 13.5 more years (to age 78.0 and 78.5 respectively). The expected total life span of 65-year-olds was substantially higher than life expectancy at birth: 19.2 years higher for men and 18.0 years higher for women.
> In 2009–2011, 65-year-old men were expected to live until they were 83.8, while 65-year-old women were expected to live until the age of 86.7. This means that from 1920–1922 to 2009–2011, the life expectancies of 65-year-olds increased by 5.8 years for men and 8.2 years for women. This is a much smaller gain than the 20-year increase in life expectancy for newborns during this same period.
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2016002...
Starting at 65, the odds of hitting an age of 90 are worth considering when doing planning:
> Assume we have 1,000 relatively healthy 65-year-old men. The chances of their staying alive at least until their 80s are quite good. More difficult, however, is avoiding critical illness – very serious conditions such as heart attacks, life-threatening cancers, stroke and Alzheimer’s. (There are 14 classifications in all.) While more than 500 of these men will survive until age 90, only 39 of them are expected to avoid a critical illness by that age. Of the 41 survivors at age 100, none is expected to be free of critical illness.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/r...