Re: Longevity

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 12:44:04 MDT


What sort of curve are you fitting to the data?

Craig B Johnson wrote:
>
> 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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