fatvegan

Life expectancy has greatly increased because of better nutrition, healthcare, and growth. In the early 1950s, life expectancy in the world as a whole was 46.5 years: today, it is about 65.4 years. In developed countries, life expectancy was already 65.6 years in the early 1950s, and is 74.8 years now. Yet developing countries have seen a much larger improvement: from 41.4 years in the early 1950s to 64.9 years now. In the early 1950s, people in industrial countries could expect to live about 24 years longer than those in developing countries. That gap has narrowed to about a decade. Speech by Anne Krueger (who I'm no fan of)

I get excited about this sort of thing. Blissfully hopeful for the future and all that. But I really hope it keeps going, and that other aspects improve. I am a little suspicious of how they distinguish developed and developing countries. They can't really use the same distinction they used in 1950, but the comparison isn't that useful if they don't. I suspect that a few populous relatively middle-income poor countries are dragging that average up a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of countries where the life expectancy was lower than in 1950. It might be better to calculate the life expectancy of the world's poorest 50% and wealthiest 50%, although numbers would be hard to get.

Some people have been predicting that life expectancy in the United States might actually go down some time in the next few years, for the first time in history. That would be mighty strange. A step towards voluntary/accidental extinction? I've been reading today about the differences between sources of nation failure external to the nation and sources that are internal. We seem to have pretty much worked out the internal ones, but I guess Armageddon By Obesity would have to count as one we've still got to confront. I reckon there'd be socio-demographic chunklets of Australia that wouldn't be moving up the life expectancy ratings that rapidly.