Re: Longevity

From: Craig B Johnson (johnscr@ms.com)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 17:25:17 MDT


Eyeballing the age-adjusted death rates, they seem to go to 0 about 2040. Yet
another singularity-ish piece of data..

hal@finney.org wrote:

> Looking up statistics on the chance of dying due to murder (0.9%) I
> found http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/releases/99facts/99sheets/97mortal.htm
> (which links to the PDF file with the actual report).
>
> Surprisingly to me, age-adjusted death rates have declined about 20%
> since 1980. The age-adjusted death rate is what the death rate would
> be if the age makeup of the population hadn't changed. It factors out
> changes in the age demographics.
>
> This means basically that you have a 20% less chance of dying in any
> given year today than you did in 1980. That's a substantial increase,
> but it's been a pretty stable trend throughout this century. Figure 1
> in the PDF file shows the trend since 1930.
>
> The longevity statistics don't show such a dramatic improvement, I suppose
> because the chance of dying gets to be so high in the 70s and 80s that
> few people live beyond that, even if there is improvement in survival.
>
> The details are shown in Figure 2. For people in their 20s and 30s
> the death rate was actually climbing through the 80s and early 90s,
> probably due to AIDS. Since the mid 90s it has fallen precipitously,
> with almost a 10% improvement just from 1996 to 1997.
>
> If you want to live, it is a good idea to know how people die. Some
> interesting statistics here.
>
> Hal



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