Well, Stayin ' Alive

Steven Johnson has written the book I ' ve been meaning to write, about the history of human life expectancy. (Don ' t worry, I ' ve got another project in the works.) I ' m not sure how the paywall works with the NYT magazine,but he provides a great overview here, which I hope you can read. As I ' ve discussed here more than a few times, life expectancy bounced around just a little from time to time and place to place from the neolithic until the late 19th Century. Then it doubled, quite suddenly, first in the wealthy countries and then around the world. It ' s an artificial construct and interpreting it isn ' t straightforward, but to put it in a pistachio shell the most important difference is infant mortality. In the old days, a whole lot of babies and young children died. So while life expectancy was around 40 years give or take, if you got past the age of 5 or so, you could hope for your three score years and ten, although not with as much expectation as we enjoy today. Women still died in large numbers in childbirth, people died of infections subsequent to minor injuries, and they died of viral diseases, notably smallpox. This has been the most dramatic change in the human condition ever. Sure, fire was nice and iron tools, and while agriculture may not have made us better off on the whole it certainly changed things. But the idea that it ' s normal for children to survive and the typical person in many countries lives to be at least 80 is mind boggling, if y...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs