Abstract
Over the last 200 years, humans experienced a huge increase of life expectancy. These advances were largely driven by extrinsic improvements of their environment (for example, the available diet, disease prevalence, vaccination, and the state of hygiene and sanitation). In this paper, we ask whether future improvements of life expectancy will be bounded from above by human life span. Life span, in contrast to life expectancy, is conceptualized as a biological measure of longevity driven by the intrinsic rate of bodily deterioration. In order to pursue our question, we first present a modern theory of aging developed by bio-gerontologists and show that immutable life span would put an upper limit on life expectancy. We then show for a sample of developed countries that human life span thus defined was indeed constant until the mid-twentieth century but increased since then in sync with life expectancy. In other words, we find evidence for manufactured life span.
Highlights
Human life span is a given constant
Compared to these earlier works, we used a larger sample consisting of more countries and covering a much longer period of time. This allowed us to confirm the earlier result of a time-invariant compensating effect until the mid-twentieth century and, based on new data from the late twentieth century, to derive the novel result of a secular increase of human life span. This finding in turn allowed us to offer a novel explanation for the observation of “broken limits to life expectancy” (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002): since about the 1970s, later born humans can expect to live longer at least partly because human life span itself is on the rise
We have introduced to the economic science a theoretical foundation of human life span based on two strong empirical regularities, the Gompertz–Makeham law and the compensation effect of mortality
Summary
Human life span is a given constant. It is the upper bound T that we put on top of the integral or sum sign when we compute expected lifetime utility of a representative agent. Compared to these earlier works, we used a larger sample consisting of more countries and covering a much longer period of time This allowed us to confirm the earlier result of a time-invariant compensating effect (timeinvariant life span) until the mid-twentieth century and, based on new data from the late twentieth century, to derive the novel result of a secular increase of human life span. This finding in turn allowed us to offer a novel explanation for the observation of “broken limits to life expectancy” (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002): since about the 1970s, later born humans can expect to live longer at least partly because human life span itself is on the rise
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