Life Expectancy Growth is Slowing Down
for more than a hundred years we have become accustomed to a simple rule: every generation has lived a longer age than the previous one. However, a new international study shows that this trend slows down and may be exhausted. Demographers watched data on deaths from 23 developed countries and concluded that people born after 1939 would not live on average for hundreds of years, despite medical progress and ever better care.
The slowdown is not due to the fact that people at an advanced age are dying earlier. on the contrary, we must look for the cause at the vrey beginning of life. Huge jumps in the average life expectancy in the first half of the last century where mainly due to a dramatic reduction in childhood and infant mortality.
Coortes’ mortality prognosis indicates slowing the average life expectancy
Vaccines,antibiotics,safer births and a cleaner environment have saved millions of young lives. This has exhausted the greatest potential for further growth and this “low -hanging fruit” is already harvested. today in rich countries almost no children die so there is no longer time to “collect years” in this way.
Life -length growth slows down
In order to understand the conclusions of the study correctly, we must distinguish two key concepts. We commonly encounter the so -called “periodic” hope of life, which is actually just a statistical picture of mortality in one particular year. However, this study focuses on a more accurate “cohort” life expectancy that monitors the real time of living people born in the same year and better filter out temporary crises (eg pandemia). so it is a much more real view of the fate of one generation.
Periodic and cohort life expectancy
Lifetime period Is it as if we made a picture in one particular year and said, “If people had been dying for their lives as often as this year, how many years would they live?” It is a statistical fiction. Cohort life length On the other hand, he follows the real year, perhaps all born in 1980, and counts how long they actually lived. Thus, it gives a more realistic picture than a one -time “photo” of one year.
And the