"Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
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"Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
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Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#2Thanks for making me realize I've been using life expectancy tables incorrectly for most of my life.
One comment regarding the yearly progress of the cohort rate. I would think this would fluctuate with significant medical advances (e.g. the first few years that bypass surgery/artificial hearts started to be used). I can't see how medical progression is perfectly linear at 1.0%/year.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#3Thanks for making me realize I've been using life expectancy tables incorrectly for most of my life. One comment regarding the yearly progress of the cohort rate. I would think this would fluctuate with significant medical advances (e.g. the first few years that bypass surgery/artificial hearts started to be used). I can't see how medical progression is perfectly linear at 1.0%/year.
I think you're overestimating the number of people who benefit from even a major advance.
In the UK (population 70 million), 28,000 heart bypass operations happen per year. The number of people who will have one is in the low single digits as a percentage of the population.
Even for those people who do have one there is no guarantee that it will have a significant impact on their lives. Yes for some it will but for others it's only reduced one possible cause of death and a lot of the behaviours that lead to heart problems also lead to, say cancer, or diabetes, or liver failure, or something else that will cut your life short.
Then compare that to the thousands of small improvements.
I can see it might not be constant over an extended period, but I don't think there are many, if any, things that would cause a significant spike.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#4This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point:
Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US.
Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clearly medical) and then compare the world rankings for heart disease deaths, you'll find many of the countries that beat the US in the life expectancy rankings do worse than the US in the heart disease mortality rankings.
You'll tend to see similar effects for other medical issues, particularly cancer, in which the US notoriously outperforms many of the European countries that outrank it on life expectancy.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#5Other than the cohort and period life expectancy, what is imp. to most people should be something else:
* How many more years do you expect to live if you are already X years old in 2012?
This is obviously different than just calculating from the cohort life expectancy of 2012-X since you you've already passed the vulnerable infancy stage. Also, say you are 90 today, so your cohort exp, for 1922 births must be something like, say 80. Your expectation of living more is certainly not -10 years!
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#6This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
Slight nitpick - accidents are not a top cause of death in the US, they are merely a top cause of early death.
But this has a disproportionate effect on low life expectancy, because early death has a disproportionate effect on life expectancy stats. 1 person dying at age 20 (instead of 80) has the same effect on life expectancy as 60 people dying at age 79 (instead of 80).
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#7Site seems to be down, Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ablog....
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#8This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
I haven't studied the data, but I would be surprised if motor vehicle deaths were "anomalously" high. My hypothesis would be that it is an entirely expected outcome given the comparative lack of public transportation in this country relative to other industrialized nations such as Japan and those in Europe. More driving miles (or, perhaps, more hours spent driving) per capita should lead to more motor vehicle accidents. And if the streets and highways are more crowded than in other countries, it might scale faster than linearly.
Though if what you meant was that motor vehicle accidents were not a good reflection of the quality of our medical care, I expect that would be a fair assessment.
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#9This is a great post. Because I'm a nerd, I'm compelled to make an orthogonal point: Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US. Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clea…
I haven't studied the data, but I would be surprised if motor vehicle deaths were "anomalously" high. My hypothesis would be that it is an entirely expected outcome given the comparative lack of public transportation in this country relative to other industrialized nations such as Japan and those in Europe. More driving miles (or, perhaps, more hours spent driving) per capita should lead to more motor vehicle acciden…
It's easier to maintain a dense public transportation system when the system's goals are (for instance) to move 80MM people around in an area the size of Colorado. Colorado, by comparison, has a population of 5MM.
But yes, I was making the latter point.
Does life expectancy tell us something about the differences between life in the United States and Finland? Yes... but what if all it's telling us is "the United States is simultaneously less dense and comparably urban to Europe"?
Re: "Life Expectancy" Doesn't Measure How Long You're Expected To Live
#10A very interesting post indeed. Another common mistake many people seem to make is when comparing historical life expectancies. Most of our progress in prolonging human life is due to minimizing the infant mortality rate. This means that people who survived infancy and childhood could make it to an old age even in historical times.