Life Expectancy Convergence Among Nations Since 1820: Separating the Effects of Technology and Income

Abstract

Figure 16.1 shows some details of the probable trajectories of limits and convergence for average life expectancy over the past four centuries. The curved line is an attempt to define the upper bound, or “best practice”, average life expectancy that could be achieved at any one time. We can think of this as an evolving upper bound to the “technophysio” evolution of the human population, in the sense proposed by Fogel and Costa (1997). The bottom limit of the graph is drawn at an average life expectancy of 22.5 years, to approximate the lowest level that a population could experience and still be viable in the long term. Today, even a country like Sierra Leone, with one of the lowest life expectancies recorded by the U.N., is close to the upper limit for a pre-1800 population.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.