←back to thread

Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove

(www.nature.com)
146 points andsoitis | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
Show context
sneed_chucker ◴[15 Oct 24 14:17 UTC] No.41848871[source]▶
Did we expect it to grow forever?
replies(5): >>41849033 #>>41849084 #>>41849264 #>>41849327 #>>41853853 #
nerdponx ◴[15 Oct 24 15:00 UTC] No.41849327[source]▶
The actual story here is that it's slowing down because the lower tail is growing, not because the upper tail is compressing as we hit some kind of upper limit of human longevity. That is: more people are actually dying younger, which has been gradually offsetting other people living longer.
replies(2): >>41852784 #>>41854523 #
edflsafoiewq ◴[15 Oct 24 20:30 UTC] No.41852784[source]▶
I wonder if "life expectancy" is really such a useful metric, since it aggregates so many different things together. It's kind of like measuring "aggregate years of human life lived".
replies(1): >>41854530 #
1. nerdponx ◴[16 Oct 24 00:36 UTC] No.41854530[source]▶
It's still useful because it provides some information. Specifically, a change in life expectancy, or a change in the rate of change in life expectancy (as here) means something. We just don't necessarily know what that something is without further study.