Abstract
Improvements in human stature, real income and life expectancy have taken place at an unprecedented speed during the last 200 years. In the case of life expectancy at birth, the record has been broken at an amazingly constant pace since 1840. Females have continuously gained 2.92 months per year, males slightly less (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002). While the increase is considerable, with improvements in life expectancy of some 8 years from parent to child, it is the regularity of the advancement that is remarkable, not the speed as such. The reason is that the countries entering the mortality transition at a later stage in history tend to exhibit an even faster improvement. Japan, for example, experienced improvements of 6 months per year in life expectancy during its catch-up in the twentieth century. In China the corresponding figure was well above 1 year in the 1960s and 70s. Thus, while the increase of best-practice countries is not astonishing in itself, the linearity of the improvement certainly is. This raises obvious questions: What are the causes of this linear increase and how long can it be sustained? Other questions concern whether the observed linear increase in life expectancy can be used in forecasting life expectancy both for countries lagging behind and countries in the lead.
Highlights
Improvements in human stature, real income and life expectancy have taken place at an unprecedented speed during the last 200 years
From around the end of the nineteenth century to present day, all countries in the industrialized world have exhibited the same development of rapid decline in infant and child mortality, which was the main reason for the rise in life expectancy
Though death rates for the elderly started to drop already in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that life expectancy was largely propelled by falling mortality at age 65 and above
Summary
Improvements in human stature, real income and life expectancy have taken place at an unprecedented speed during the last 200 years. While the increase is considerable, with improvements in life expectancy of some 8 years from parent to child, it is the regularity of the advancement that is remarkable, not the speed as such. While the increase of bestpractice countries is not astonishing in itself, the linearity of the improvement certainly is. To Oeppen and Vaupel, the linear development of life expectancy suggests that the process of mortality reductions “should not be seen as a disconnected sequence of unrepeatable revolutions but rather as a regular stream of continuing progress” (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002:1029), referring to Lee and Carter (1992), and Tuljapurkar et al (2000). In the sentence Oeppen and Vaupel state, with reference to Riley (2001), that mortality improvements are the result of a complex process of “advances in income, salubrity, nutrition, education, sanitation, and medicine, with the mix varying over age, period, cohort, place, and diversity” (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002:1029). What mixture of factors varying over age, period, cohort, diversity of diseases, and place has made them the global leaders of life length? I will turn to the issue of causality
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