[ExI] Half of everyone who ever reached 65 are alive now?

[Tomaz Kristan]

Interesting. One could ask, if more than half over 110 lives today?
Apparently not, since there are only few of them and many were older than
110 in the past. Easily to check it out.

What about those over 100?

What is the lowest number X, over which half older than X years are alive
today.

There is no such X, I am quite certain.

- Thomas



On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Max More <max at maxmore.com> wrote:

> 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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