Life expectancy is not entirely medical and is not a particularly good way to compare countries. Consider that among the top causes of death in the US are "accidents" (predominantly motor vehicles) and suicide, both of which are anomalously high in the US.
Consider also that if you go to the top US cause of death (heart disease, clearly medical) and then compare the world rankings for heart disease deaths, you'll find many of the countries that beat the US in the life expectancy rankings do worse than the US in the heart disease mortality rankings.
You'll tend to see similar effects for other medical issues, particularly cancer, in which the US notoriously outperforms many of the European countries that outrank it on life expectancy.
If by not entirely medical you mean overwhelmingly not medical, then yes. Of the 30 years that life expectancy increased in the 20th century, 25 of those years were do to non-medical factors according to the CDC.
Furthermore, if you actually look at the top 'medical' causes of death, they can overwhelmingly be prevented by non-medical means. To quote from Overdose In America, "Simply eating fish once a week reduces the risk of stroke by 22 percent. Controlling high blood pressure reduces the risk of stroke by 35 to 45 percent. And even moderate exercise for less than two hours a week reduces the risk of stroke in an elderly population by about 60 percent."
Furthermore, just 1.2% of Americans meet all 7 cardiovascular health metrics from 2005 to 2010, compared to 2% from 1988 to 1994. These metrics are not smoking, being physically active, having blood pressure under control, maintaining healthy blood glucose levels, maintaining healthy blood cholesterol levels, mainting a healthy body weight, and following a healthy and balanced diet.
Usually the way I hear this statistical point made is that the US leads the world in life expectancy when accidental injuries and violent crime are omitted. (Usually the point is deployed to caution people against making quick conclusions about US diet or medical care quality from national life expectancies, as for example here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-amer...)
But this has a disproportionate effect on low life expectancy, because early death has a disproportionate effect on life expectancy stats. 1 person dying at age 20 (instead of 80) has the same effect on life expectancy as 60 people dying at age 79 (instead of 80).
Probably some part of the vehicle deaths will "leak" over to other categories, but there should be an overall reduction.
FWIW, I looked into this using the tables on http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/all-cancer... - not just the all cancers table, but also the separate tables for different types of cancer. The implication of what you write - that the US has better medical healthcare - didn't seem to stand out. Rather, it looked like different European countries have markedly different death rates from different cancers. Things like diet, lifestyle, prevalence of smoking, etc. seem like a better explanation for the variance. France has especially low heart disease deaths, for example, but slightly higher cancer deaths than the US. Etc.
And of course we all die of something, so I would expect cancer deaths to be higher in a country with a higher life expectancy even if the medical success in treatment was higher. Third world countries generally do not have high deaths from cancer.
The United States ranks #41, ahead of much of the EU but behind Germany and France, on ovarian cancer.
The United States ranks #61, again ahead of almost all of the EU, on breast cancer.
Here I might point out that to come in much higher than the US in these numbers, ie, to be Gabon, you have to have a lot of people dying before they can get cancer. Moving on:
The United States ranks #27 on leukemia, besting France, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.
The United States is #170 on stomach cancer, ahead of all of Europe.
The United States does worse than Europe on lung cancer, and is right in the middle of the pack on skin cancer. Other than that, the narrative is pretty clear.
If I have a higher-than-average chance of dying in an automobile accident in a specific country, that's good information to have. In fact, I want to know all the particularly common ways I could die somewhere, be it via car or mortar attack. I think that's a great way to compare countries and life expectancy. Maybe I miss your point?
Though if what you meant was that motor vehicle accidents were not a good reflection of the quality of our medical care, I expect that would be a fair assessment.
But yes, I was making the latter point.
Does life expectancy tell us something about the differences between life in the United States and Finland? Yes... but what if all it's telling us is "the United States is simultaneously less dense and comparably urban to Europe"?
Road quality in the United states is low compared to other OPEC countries
Seatbelts and motorbike helmets are still not mandatory in all US states
Car quality and safety in the United States is lower than other OPEC countries
EDIT: I meant OECD, not OPEC.
Depends. Does getting shot while driving count? ;-)
Maybe I am getting it wrong but does it matter how you die? Generally speaking (averaged out,) if you live in US and do what the average person does, you will get in accidents and deal with the pressures that push some to suicides (around 10 to 22 per 100,000 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-14/suicide-rates-rise-... .) Even if you are careful, the recently licensed teenager, to stereotype, can ram his car into yours.
* How many more years do you expect to live if you are already X years old in 2012?
This is obviously different than just calculating from the cohort life expectancy of 2012-X since you you've already passed the vulnerable infancy stage. Also, say you are 90 today, so your cohort exp, for 1922 births must be something like, say 80. Your expectation of living more is certainly not -10 years!
This is of course false. Back in the early 1900's when life expectancy was only around 60, if you survived your childhood, you'd likely live to 70 or 80.
This didn't seem right so I checked. A 20 year old in 1900 could expect to live to 62. In 1939 (4 years after SS was first put in place) a 20 year old would live to 67.
Interpretted as a median age of death, you are right that more than 50% of 20 year-olds collected at least 1 check, but a significant fraction died before retirement age, and they generally didn't say in retirement for decades.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html I used white males, and women lived longer but non-whites lived shorter.
By the time you hit 60, you've gone from ~75 to ~80.
I'd like to see a plot of the distribution of lifetime as a function of birth year. I.e. a 3D plot with current age on the X axis, age of death on the Z axis, and probability on the Y axis. (Where, as in Minecraft, X is east/west, Z is south/north.)
Cut off the portion representing people who have died already (Z < now-X), renormalize each cohort so its Y values add up to 1, and you'll get the distribution of lifetimes for people who are alive today. (I.e. a conditional distribution, conditioned on being alive today.) Which at least one other poster was asking about.
"Biodemography of human ageing" Nature. 2010 Mar 25;464(7288):536-42. doi:10.1038/nature08984
http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
covers most of the essential issues. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
Meanwhile, a person at any given age can look up period life tables for what the blog post author of the post submitted here correctly describes as a MINIMUM life expectancy at that person's current age.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
(The links shown are for United States data, but data like these are available for most developed countries.)
It is also possible to find life expectancy formulas adjusted for personal health status and lifestyle.
http://www.msrs.state.mn.us/info/Age_Cal.htmls
(Minnesota data)
http://www.bupa.com.au/health-and-wellness/tools-and-apps/to...
(Australia data)
The link posted last week
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
gives good data on trends in causes of death from 1960 to the present in the United States and in OECD countries as a whole. It showed that life expectancy at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and at age 80 have all increased during the years shown on the chart.
One comment regarding the yearly progress of the cohort rate. I would think this would fluctuate with significant medical advances (e.g. the first few years that bypass surgery/artificial hearts started to be used). I can't see how medical progression is perfectly linear at 1.0%/year.
In the UK (population 70 million), 28,000 heart bypass operations happen per year. The number of people who will have one is in the low single digits as a percentage of the population.
Even for those people who do have one there is no guarantee that it will have a significant impact on their lives. Yes for some it will but for others it's only reduced one possible cause of death and a lot of the behaviours that lead to heart problems also lead to, say cancer, or diabetes, or liver failure, or something else that will cut your life short.
Then compare that to the thousands of small improvements.
I can see it might not be constant over an extended period, but I don't think there are many, if any, things that would cause a significant spike.
While it's hard to predict, I personally wouldn't bet against a game changing spike in the coming decades. It's only very recently that medicine has started riding Moore's law. Robotics and miniaturization are speeding up basic research by orders of magnitude.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that biology has achieved more in the past two decades than in all preceding history. And there's no sign that the exponential is running out.
Granted, there may be fundamental limits that we don't appreciate yet. That's the whole draw of science, we simply don't know.
This makes sense - medical advances won't be widely adopted immediately, then there will be a gradual acceleration of adoption (and improvement rate) once its benefits are proven and costs come down, and then no further contribution to improvements once wide adoption is the norm.
What you also tend to see is that advances affect improvements by year of birth more prominently than by year of discovery. In the UK we have a 'golden cohort' for example, which you could Google for more info.
Spikes do tend to occur during and after big causes of death (spanish flu, world wars) as the improvement rate drops sharply and then recovers again.
They keep dangling that retirement carrot in front of us, but by the time we get to enjoy it, we're dead.
[1]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm)
