# life expectancy

In by Mark Goodman

Average service life or functional period in years, assuming regular maintenance.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
life expectancy (noun)
the average life span of an individual
life expectancy (Wikipedia)

Human life expectancy at birth, measured by region, between 1950 and 2050

Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age and other demographic factors including gender. The most commonly used measure of life expectancy is at birth (LEB), which can be defined in two ways. Cohort LEB is the mean length of life of an actual birth cohort (all individuals born a given year) and can be computed only for cohorts born many decades ago, so that all their members have died. Period LEB is the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed, from birth through death, to the mortality rates observed at a given year.

National LEB figures reported by statistical national agencies and international organizations are indeed estimates of period LEB. In the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, LEB was 26 years; the 2010 world LEB was 67.2 years. For recent years, in Swaziland LEB is about 49, and in Japan, it is about 83. The combination of high infant mortality and deaths in young adulthood from accidents, epidemics, plagues, wars, and childbirth, particularly before modern medicine was widely available, significantly lowers LEB. But for those who survive early hazards, a life expectancy of 60 or 70 would not be uncommon. For example, a society with a LEB of 40 may have few people dying at precisely 40: most will die before 30 or after 55. In populations with high infant mortality rates, LEB is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. Because of this sensitivity to infant mortality, LEB can be subjected to gross misinterpretation, leading one to believe that a population with a low LEB will necessarily have a small proportion of older people. For example, in a hypothetical stationary population in which half the population dies before the age of five but everybody else dies at exactly 70 years old, LEB will be about 36, but about 25% of the population will be between the ages of 50 and 70. Another measure, such as life expectancy at age 5 (e5), can be used to exclude the effect of infant mortality to provide a simple measure of overall mortality rates other than in early childhood; in the hypothetical population above, life expectancy at 5 would be another 65. Aggregate population measures, such as the proportion of the population in various age groups, should also be used along individual-based measures like formal life expectancy when analyzing population structure and dynamics.

Mathematically, life expectancy is the mean number of years of life remaining at a given age, assuming age-specific mortality rates remain at their most recently measured levels. It is denoted by ${\displaystyle e_{x}}$, which means the mean number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged ${\displaystyle x}$, according to a particular mortality experience. Longevity, maximum lifespan, and life expectancy are not synonyms. Life expectancy is defined statistically as the mean number of years remaining for an individual or a group of people at a given age. Longevity refers to the characteristics of the relatively long life span of some members of a population. Maximum lifespan is the age at death for the longest-lived individual of a species. Moreover, because life expectancy is an average, a particular person may die many years before or many years after the "expected" survival. The term "maximum life span" has a quite different meaning and is more related to longevity.

Life expectancy is also used in plant or animal ecology;life tables (also known as actuarial tables). The term life expectancy may also be used in the context of manufactured objects, but the related term shelf life is used for consumer products, and the terms "mean time to breakdown" (MTTB) and "mean time between failures" (MTBF) are used in engineering.

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