[ExI] Half of everyone who ever reached 65 are alive now?
Max More
max at maxmore.com
Wed Apr 14 16:10:43 UTC 2010
In this modestly interesting article...
The shock of the old: Welcome to the elderly age
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627550.100-the-shock-of-the-old-welcome-to-the-elderly-age.html
...the following claim is made:
"Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65,
half are alive now."
This sounds a bit like (but less implausible) the claim that more
people are alive today than the total number of people who ever lived
in the past. The latter claim turns out to be extremely far from the
truth. I haven't tried to calculate the numbers for this more modest
65+ claim, but it seems dubious. For instance, I suspect the author
is using the life expectancy of past ages (say 30) and treating that
as the age at which practically everyone died. In reality, even when
life expectancy at birth was very low, that was substantially due to
high infant mortality. Some people surely did live to 65. A small
percentage than today, to be sure, but I find it implausible that the
65+s of all of human history don't exceed those today.
But I may be wrong. Anyone know of any other analyses of this?
Max
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