Question: how long do people live

Hi frogyy,

It’s important to remember that “life expectancy” is a “probabilistic” thing. So we could say, for example, that in a particular country, 50% of all women will have died by the age of 80, 75% will have died by age 86, and so on, but we can’t say how for how long any one person WILL LIVE.

“Life expectancy” is the average number of years that people live. Life expectancy is a complicated thing, because

(i) People born in later years are likely to live longer than people born in earlier years: so you, being born in the 1990s, have a greater chance of living to 80 or 90 or 100 than I do, since I was born in the 1980s. But the life expectancy for babies born today has to be guessed (in a scientific way) from the older people who are dying today!

(ii) Life expectancy is different for every different group you care to think of: men or women, Aborigines or non-Aboriginal Australians; smokers or non-smokers; etc etc.

(iii) Your life expectancy changes as you get older: people most often talk about life expectancy AT BIRTH, but leave out the ‘at birth’ bit. Suppose that, when you were born, your life expectancy was 80. When you are 10 years old, your life expectancy is actually a little bit MORE THAN 70 (80 – 10 = 70) because the original number of 80 includes children who die before age 10, and you’ve already survived the first ten years!

Some really detailed numbers (if you’re really interested) are available here:
http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720
(you need to choose a country from the ‘filter’ drop-down box).