Life expectancy at birth is mainly dominated by infant mortality x birth rate (which is part of why Africa is so abysmally low). It's much more interesting (and pretty) to look at the 3D chart of life expectancy distributions at age N. Unfortunately this is really only available for a subset of developed countries, and not even really for a lot of subpopulations within them without a lot of digging.
CIS countries (like Belarus, Azerbaijan and Russia) have quite low infant mortality, and yet life expectancy is second only to Africa, from the bottom of course.
I'm kind of surprised seeing Iran in the same basket, why?
Lowering infant mortality will generally get you into the 70-80 bracket.
The countries with 80+ life expectancy are those with the best and most available hospital systems and active program where they treat aging diseases. That's really only happened in the last 20 years.
The USSR did very well until it collapsed, but since then life expectancy has kind of stagnated in most of the former Soviet republics (see the Gapminder link below)
Iran lost a statistically significant number of people during the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980's. That's showing in the life expectancy stats.
It didn't, life expectancy actually went backwards in Russia in 1965-1985. It stagnated for women and fell a few years for men. This is while rest of the world increased life expectancy rapidly. You can see that in your linked website.
A good comparsion pair is Russia-Finland. Same expectancy and GDP in 1960, and then they begin to diverge rapidly.
Hm, you are right (although in Russia/USSR it kept improving until 1970 and then fell back - see[1] for exact numbers).
[2] claims it can be shown to be caused by alcohol abuse, and that an aggressive anti-alcohol campaign in the mid 1980's reversed the trend just in time for the collapse of the Soviet Union (when the campaign stopped and the gains fell away again). It's probably that bump that confused me, as it seems many others have said the same thing.
As always I'd say that you'd have to be particularly pessimistic to believe these numbers. To hit these numbers would require the present revolution in capabilities in biotechnology to produce pretty much nothing of practical use. It would require the present sea change in the aging research and broader medical community in attitudes towards aging, the growing advocacy among researchers to treat aging as a medical condition (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468941/ ), and greater funding directed specifically at the production of ways to treat aging, all of that to go nowhere.
I don't think that is realistic. There are startups now working on ways to repair the specific known causes of aging, forms of damage that contribute to a wide range of age-related disease. Oisin Biotech for senescent cell clearance, Human Rejuvenation Technologies for clearance of metabolic waste that contributes to atherosclerosis among other conditions, Gensight for mitochondrial DNA repair, and so forth. Is all this really going to go nowhere, have no real impact on the present very gentle upward slope in life expectancy?
Betting against leaps in technology progress doesn't seem a winning choice given the past 150 years and the present environment especially.
There is no exponential progress in medicine. In fact, medicine is in some ways actually regressing, in particular through growing antibiotic resistance.
Where is this evidence for leaps in medical technological progress? The regular news stories prematurely heralding the end of some disease based solely on some priliminary in-vitro result that likely won't ever make it to a Phase 1 clinical trial?
I am betting that medicine will look twenty years from now largely as it does today. It will be painful, expensive, unautomated, unscientific, and of course, largely ineffective--just as it did twenty years before today. Had I made this prediction in 1970, 1980, 1990, or (extrapolating 5 years into the future) 2000, I would have been absolutely correct, so I see no reason to stop making it.
Take care of yourself. Do not assume regenerative medicine will fix the damage done to your body through smoking, excessive drinking, poor diet, or lack of exercise. Even if some genuine breakthrough arrived tomorrow, it would still take years to receive FDA approval and would likely cost a small fortune (see Sovaldi).
There is no exponential progress in medicine. In fact, medicine is in some ways actually regressing, in particular through growing antibiotic resistance.
Whilst medical progress isn't exponential this comment is way too pessimistic. Take the falling rates of mortality due to cancer[1][2].
Falling infant mortality means more people are living long enough to get cancer. But slowly we are winning that battle too as the mortality rate shows.
I am betting that medicine will look twenty years from now largely as it does today. It will be painful, expensive, unautomated, unscientific, and of course, largely ineffective--just as it did twenty years before today. Had I made this prediction in 1970, 1980, 1990, or (extrapolating 5 years into the future) 2000, I would have been absolutely correct, so I see no reason to stop making it.
It's usually a good bet to think that things will look the same in the future as they do now. However, your 2000-to-2020 bet is utterly and completely wrong because of the huge progress against Malaria if nothing else.
Since 2000, anti-malaria efforts have saved over 3 million lives and cut the mortality rate by nearly 50%[3]. That's a huge, planet changing piece of progress.
In the developed world, the HPV Cancer Vaccine is having a similar effect on cervical cancer (one of the most common cancer types for women).
Even if some genuine breakthrough arrived tomorrow, it would still take years to receive FDA approval and would likely cost a small fortune (see Sovaldi).
In most of the world public health systems pay for most truly effective medications.
How long would it take you to find a collision in SHA1 with $10,000 to spend on equipment and electricity?
Reading the intro to [1] specifically the 4th paragraph, would suggest that sometime in the next fifteen years, a breakthrough for finding a collision should probably be developed, and if you wait for when that happens, say, 14 years from now, then $10,000 should still buy you enough computing power to do it within a year, at the computing prices that exist then. Computing power increases much faster than inflation. So the answer is "15 years, 14 years of waiting and then 1 year of computing. +/- 30 years and 70 years, respectively."
in other words: it's just pure speculation. not a real answer. a real answer is "we don't know, but with current computers and current algorithms, > 100 years, it just can't be done with $10k in equipment. however this is likely to decrease soon."
you're basically adding the same caveat to life expectancy.
Life expectancy by career might be much more interesting and specific. Or if a career is linked to specific diseases.
I'm also curious, which state in the US has the largest life expectancy
An interesting (and well-known) artifact is that Asians in the US have highest life expectancies in the world. In addition to possibly having good genetics for this purpose, they avoid the anomalous adverse factors in US life expectancies (vehicular accidents and homicide) while taking advantage of the fact that the US generally has the best average medical outcomes in the world for the diseases that tend to kill older populations.
From a life expectancy standpoint, Asian Americans have the perfect intersection of genetics, avoidance of injury, and medical outcomes. Given the size of disparities in life expectancy, shifts in demographics alone would be sufficient to explain some of the increase in life expectancy.
I'd also be interested in how the U.S breaks down by states and certain regions, like SF or Palo Alto/Mountain View, Manhattan, Boulder, Austin, etc... Since the U.S is very heterogeneous, it probably leads to a lot of variability in life expectancy across different regions. The countries at the top of the list are very homogeneous and wealthy. Wouldn't be surprised if the top cities in terms of wealth and education exceed life expectancy of the top country on the list -- Monaco.
it just /hurts/. Recently ranked as increasingly commercially competitive. Meanwhile, we have a mean lifetime of not even 50? Those facts should be taken together.
I wonder how countries get to 80 year on average given all those early cancers and genetical diseases (also fatalities and suicides) that are surely to reap their harvest.
This should mean that average for people who did not die prematurely is more close to 90 years. That's scary.
Personally I'd be happy enough to live to 70, and won't be surprised to die much earlier.
Which makes the US's social security system a bit insane. Somehow you're expected to live 20-30 years off of income derived from paying into a system for 40-50 years. (or less, given the number entering the work force in the their late 20s or early 30s)
Aristotle, Socrates, Plato lived to their 60s, 70s, 80s respectively.
Granted less people are dying young now, it seems like we have been able to extend the time we live. That is to say if you were born 400 BC and lived a proper lifestyle you would have probably lived just as long as the guy who is born today and lives a proper lifestyle.
