Very Long-Term Mortality Trends in England and Wales, 1841-2022
When were the largest improvements in mortality in England & Wales?
Yesterday, Stuart MacDonald MBE posted the following at LinkedIn:
This is just the beginning of the post, so go to the link to see all the text.
The original Our World in Data post is here: It’s not just about child mortality, life expectancy increased at all ages
But let me use the graphs from Stuart MacDonald first, and then make my own graphs so that we can peel off different parts to compare.
England and Wales PERIOD life expectancy, both sexes, includes soldiers
Note that I made a point that it’s not only both sexes but that soldiers are also included. (I will talk about period life expectancy in a moment.)
You can see multiple events in this graph. The dip in the late 1840s coincides with the Irish Potato Famine, which affected not only Ireland. Yes, Dickens is involved.
There is another widespread dip at the end of the 19th century, which was the large flu pandemic before the one that occurred in 1918…. but that huge dip is due to World War I, which was devastating, more to males than females:
England and Wales PERIOD life expectancy, males, includes soldiers
England and Wales PERIOD life expectancy, females, includes soldiers
Notice how deeply the life expectancy drops for males compared to females. That’s how you can see the effect of a devastating war versus a pandemic.
You can also see the relatively smaller effect of World War II.
When you see these curves, you can better understand the hesitancy of powers like England and France to enter into war with Germany in WWII. The mortality effects for France from WWI were even worse than what England saw. (Forget about what had happened to Germany.) Trying to avoid war for as long as possible seemed a rational move.
There are also some smaller flu pandemic effects in mid-20th century that you may not realize. I wrote about those pandemics back in 2020:
Those were about 1957 and 1968. Their effects on period life expectancy were minimal.
All the way to the right, you can see the effect of COVID on the period life expectancy for England and Wales. Unlike the U.S., I believe England and Wales mainly had natural causes of death increase to impact life expectancy.
We in the U.S. had drug overdoses, homicides, and motor vehicle accident deaths increase greatly (at young ages) to add to our mix. But more on that another time.
Geeking out: Period life expectancy vs. cohort life expectancy
Before I get into the improvements in life expectancy at which ages, I will pull out my explanation of period life expectancy versus cohort life expectancy, because this is important.
Period life expectancy has little connection to how long any person will live (or has lived, for that matter.) This is the life expectancy being graphed above and the “life expectancy” you hear reported in the media constantly.
Don’t base your retirement planning on this number. It’s generally too low.
What you want is the cohort life expectancy, which is the life expectancy based on the year you were born (and involves assumptions of what future mortality will be… because you haven’t died yet.)
Period life expectancy simply takes the death data in a single calendar year, then pretends that is the mortality seen for a population’s lifetime. Then you calculate life expectancy stats based on that mortality table. It’s a construction intended to follow how population mortality changes over time.
I prefer using age-adjusted death rates or just the mortality rates at specific ages or for age groups. But following the change in period life expectancy is another way. That’s what we’re doing in this post.
But if you, as an individual, want to consider retirement planning, you need to project your likely lifetime not based on the current year but based on likely mortality trends in the future. That’s what cohort life expectancy is for.
More posts on discussing period life expectancy v cohort life expectancy
When and at What Ages Have Been the Greatest Mortality Improvement?
If we measure the mortality improvement via the increase in period life expectancy from various ages — I’m picking 0 (birth), 1, 20, 40, and 60 semi-arbitrarily.
It’s not all that arbitrary, as the first year of life has very high mortality for much of history, so picking 0 and 1 year makes sense. I picked the nice round ages of 20, 40, and 60 to try to grab improvements made in young adulthood, middle age, and older ages.
I don’t want to deal with the effects of COVID, so I took the 1841-2021 period (I grabbed data from mortality.org, which had 1x1 tables going only to 2021), and slices it up into 6 periods of approximately 30 years each. This is how the life expectancy improvement/changes shook out:
It looks like 1900-1930 had the biggest boost in improvement, with 1930-1960 following close behind. Notice the biggest boosts are at the youngest ages, which makes sense.
Note that 1960-1990 wasn’t too hot, but 1990-2019 was even better.
Note that life expectancy dropped between 1841 and 1870, even if slightly — if you look at the graphs above, there is a lot of noise in the plotted life expectancy in the 19th century. Some of that comes from the data quality and from the methods used by the Human Mortality Database to build these tables.
One interesting change — look at 1870-1900. Period life expectancy extended for younger ages, but shortened for older ages. Older people were very susceptible to infectious disease, especially pneumonia, in the pre-antibiotic age. Life expectancy past age 60 was very flat pre-20th century.
I will do a similar analysis for the U.S., but I do not have data for as long a period for the U.S., alas. I will have to pull from sources other than mortality.org.
Thanks, MP.
Re: this - "Period life expectancy extended for younger ages, but shortened for older ages. Older people were very susceptible to infectious disease, especially pneumonia, in the pre-antibiotic age."
Shortened from the previous period measured?
Why would older people become MORE susceptible to pneumonia?