The doubling of life-expectancy
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steven Johnson, author of Extra Life, tells the fascinating history of life expectancy, and the extraordinary achievements of the last century, in which it has practically doubled.
It’s a story that has data at its heart, from the ground-breaking invention of the category itself in 17th century London to the pioneering social health surveys of W.E.B. Du Bois in 1890s Philadelphia.
Tim Harford spoke to Steven about the numbers beneath possibly the most important number of all.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service with me, Tim Halford. Every week we look |
| 0:06.4 | at the numbers and statistics that shape the world and our lives. And this week we're looking at |
| 0:12.0 | arguably the most important number in our lives. The number of years each of us can expect to live, |
| 0:18.0 | or life expectancy. Inspired by the economist Max Rosa, I've argued in my own book that we should |
| 0:24.5 | often be stepping back and thinking about statistics on a different time frame. Ourly rolling news |
| 0:30.9 | headlines look different to the stories in a weekly or monthly magazine. And what if we published |
| 0:36.8 | a newspaper every century? The headlines in a hundred year newspaper would focus on big, |
| 0:42.8 | slow moving stories. And I suspect that life expectancy doubles might well be on the front page. |
| 0:50.5 | So how did this incredible story of progress happen? For an answer, I spoke to the American |
| 0:57.7 | science writer Stephen Johnson. He's spent the last few years investigating the history of |
| 1:03.0 | life expectancy and the dramatic improvements we've seen over the last century. And he's written a |
| 1:08.1 | book Extra Life, a short history of living longer. Stephen began by taking us back to the beginning. |
| 1:15.7 | We believe that all the way back to hunter gatherer societies, the whole sweep of human civilization |
| 1:23.6 | from 10,000 years ago to about 1800. There was very little change in overall life expectancy. |
| 1:31.3 | No matter who you were, you could be the wealthiest person in the world or you could be a hunter |
| 1:35.0 | gatherer somewhere. Average life expectancy was about 35 in large part because 40% of children |
| 1:41.1 | died before adulthood, just a shocking number. And it basically, it was just stuck at that level, |
| 1:47.0 | what I call in the book, the long ceiling. It really didn't vary from that point until about 1800. |
| 1:52.5 | In which point it starts to take off in England, in parts of the United States, in Europe, |
| 1:58.2 | initially for wealthy people. And then it becomes kind of a democratic movement in the second half |
| 2:02.7 | of the 19th century. And today, global life expectancy, I mean, all around the world is something like |
| 2:09.6 | 72.6 years. So we really have doubled the average human life spanning and dramatically reduce the |
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