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    Your Elvenar Team

Average Lifespan - Truth or Lie?

Is the average lifespan really 75+?


  • Total voters
    6
  • Poll closed .

Ashrem

Oh Wise One
Social security is part of a societal contract for the betterment of the collective. The only way it can pay out more than it receives is by borrowing from the following generations. Like everything else that humans do, administration bleeds a portion off the top, even if everyone behaved altruistically, which never happens. "Fair" is a value judgement that will not be identical between two people. Fairness is a laudable goal, but is a physical impossibility. the best we can hope for "equally," by treating everyone the same, regardless of whether it is fair to do so. Social Security attempts to treat everyone the same.

It's not possible for an income redistribution to be fair to everyone, so to be equal it has to aim to be fair to the largest possible group. That manifests as: people who are not healthy will get less out than they put in. There is no way around that which will satisfy enough people to make it work. In the meantime, there will always be people who don't care about the greater good, and so will go out of their way to avoid any possibility of putting in more than they get back, leaving yet another way in which it will always be unfair.
 

DeletedUser12423

Guest
to be equal it has to aim to be fair to the largest possible group.
Ok, now that makes sense to me. For the Greater Good. Doing the most good, for the most people, and I don't mind doing that. There are other ways I can prepare for retirement, but I'm starting in my middle age. So it's a very late start. Maybe we should do more to educate the younger generation about this.
 

Ashrem

Oh Wise One
Maybe we should do more to educate the younger generation about this.
Absolutely we should. It is not natural for humans to plan for their old age. The world has spent a long time teaching us that where the next meal is coming from is what matters. I "benefited" (if you can call it that) from watching my parents struggle and die in poverty when I was a teenager because they were terrible financial planners. I created my first retirement savings before I was 30. I still won't have by any stretch a comfortable old age, but I won't be eating cat-food, either. My goal is to be able to eat and have a roof over my head. I won't be traveling to Mexico in the winter, but neither will I be picking bottles out of garbage cans.
 

DeletedUser12423

Guest
I would "like" your post but I can't in the Lounge. That makes alot of sense. Thank you ^ ^
 

SoggyShorts

Mathematician par Excellence
Maybe we should do more to educate the younger generation about this.
Absolutely we should. It is not natural for humans to plan for their old age. The world has spent a long time teaching us that where the next meal is coming from is what matters. I "benefited" (if you can call it that) from watching my parents struggle and die in poverty when I was a teenager because they were terrible financial planners.
When I think about all the crap we learned in C.A.L.M. class (career and life management) in high school I'm super annoyed that they didn't teach us anything about investing, retirement, taxes, mortgages etc. We did have guest speakers sometimes, like a heroin addict etc, but never an investment advisor or anything like that.
I think a government that was capable of thinking more than 4 or 8 years into the future would be able to see that paying someone to educate the next generation about money and retirement would save money in the long run.
Heck, I've thought about being a guest speaker(for free), but I don't have the appropriate credentials other than my own experiences and lessons.
 

DeletedUser14880

Guest
Idk if anyone has touched on this as of yet... Haha but honestly when ppl talk about people dying too young at 60 or 70 I giggle a little on the inside. Of course death is not what I'm laughing at, because everyone dies too young when it all comes down to it... well unless you're immortal or something.. but even then it's still relative. I laugh because I always think of how short lifespans were once in history. I still remember reading about the dark ages for the first time and my textbook making it a point to note out how lucky someone was to make it into middle age. I'd definitely go out on a limb and say we've made some progress :p
 

DeletedUser3588

Guest
I always thought when they say average life span is about people who die naturally, meaning passing on,
but not including people who get sick no matter what reason, or the accidents, or the ones who do take their own life unnecessary
if they do include them. well what will be average then ??? maybe 40-50-60..
 

Ashrem

Oh Wise One
I always thought when they say average life span is about people who die naturally, meaning passing on,but not including people who get sick no matter what reason, or the accidents, or the ones who do take their own life unnecessary
if they do include them. well what will be average then ??? maybe 40-50-60..
I'm not aware of anyone who refers to average lifespan as not including deaths from all causes. Most statistics related to lifespan are to assist with planning for things like insurance and government pension payouts or labour-force predictions. They don't care why you die, only how likely you are to die in any given year.

Expected lifespan is exactly that. How long the average person born in that year is likely to live, and it isn't forever-fixed the day you are born. When they find a cure for something potentially lethal, the expected lifespan of everyone already alive increases by a little bit, and going forward, the average lifespan of everyone in your coterie also increases (not that you know what it is until they are all dead).
 

DeletedUser3507

Guest
I'm not aware of anyone who refers to average lifespan as not including deaths from all causes. Most statistics related to lifespan are to assist with planning for things like insurance and government pension payouts or labour-force predictions. They don't care why you die, only how likely you are to die in any given year.

Expected lifespan is exactly that. How long the average person born in that year is likely to live, and it isn't forever-fixed the day you are born. When they find a cure for something potentially lethal, the expected lifespan of everyone already alive increases by a little bit, and going forward, the average lifespan of everyone in your coterie also increases (not that you know what it is until they are all dead).

Exactly...;)
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
An interesting book, "Pandora' Seed" by Spencer Wells, has a great discussion of median life span and a nice chart of it all the way back to Paleolithic days (30,000 to 9,000 BC). From those (very) ancient times until the 19th century the median life span is listed at between 30.0 years to 38.4 for women (gradually improving, thankfully) and 35.4 to 40.0 for men. The "late 20th Century" is listed as78.5 for women and 71.0 for men, a tremendous improvement.

What he says about how people dies is even more, in my opinion, interesting. He says that in the last 30,000 years there have been three primary causes of death. First, accidents; second, communicable diseases; and third, chronic diseases. Almost all people died of accidental causes in the very ancient times..including child birth though it is, strictly speaking, not accidental. From about 9,000 to nearly present day communicable diseases were responsible for most deaths. And now that most communicable diseases have been at least dealt a heavy blow if not eradicated, most people die from chronic diseases caused not directly by organisms but by organisms in response to genetic or long term environmental factors. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer and the like are included in this list.

Finally, the firs 4 chapters or so have a good description of how gene expression has changed in relation to environmental and social changes over the last 30,000 years and are worth reading. After that, chapters 5-8 are more about politics than science and, unfortunately, are pretty predictably vapid "answers' to the needed responses to problems raised by the changing genetic expression of the human species. Just as unfortunately these "answers" do not really follow what proceeds in my opinion. Still, the book was very much worth the read.

AJ
 
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