Not dead yet
On Stuff’s front page there’s a headline “Life expectancies heading down.” Clicking through gives “Kiwi kids destined for shorter lives than parents”.
Here’s the New Zealand life expectancy over time, from StatsNZ, first by gender, then (for a shorter time period) by gender and Maori/non-Maori ethnicity
Life expectancy has been increasing for a long time, and over the past 25 years (a reasonable definition of a generation) there has been an increase of about eight years.
The story is saying that this increase may soon start to slow down and reverse. That’s possible, and even plausible, but it hasn’t started to happen yet, and it would take a lot for life expectancy curves to not just flatten but to decrease fast enough to give an eight-year reduction, so that kids born today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents’ generation.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
May even go down due to more accurate population estimates of the oldest part of the population. The BBC have on their website have an article “Where are the missing 90-year-olds?” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23126814 the answer being that estimates of those over 90 in the UK were higher than the census actually showed. The article also links to the original paper “Longevity and our ‘missing’ 90-year-olds” http://www.theactuary.com/features/2012/11/longevity-and-our-missing-90-year-olds/
11 years ago