Six Hours Per Day

An article from the Duke University media outlet reminds us of the bigger historical picture of human life expectancy: continual incremental improvement ever since the Industrial Revolution. It's also a good example of how to write a decent popular science press piece, one that adds context to the research it references, rather than dumbing it down or papering it over. From the perspective of the reliability theory of aging and longevity, the historical increase in life expectancy has occurred because better and more widespread availability of medical technology lowers the rate at which biological damage accumulates. Prevention of chronic infectious disease, for example, falls into this category: disease applies a damage load to an individual, and that damage reduces the mean time to failure of bodily systems.

"We're living longer because people are reaching old age in better health," said demographer James Vaupel, author of a review article appearing in the March 25 edition of Nature. But once it starts, the process of aging itself - including dementia and heart disease - is still happening at pretty much the same rate. "Deterioration, instead of being stretched out, is being postponed." ... Over the past 170 years, in the countries with the highest life expectancies, the average life span has grown at a rate of 2.5 years per decade, or about 6 hours per day.

Six hours per day sounds a lot more exciting than a few years per decade - there's a lesson about the time preference of human psychology lurking in there somewhere. Advocates take note: tell your friends how many extra hours of life they gained today thanks to advancing medical technology, and see what they say.

But to return to the article, the other lesson here is that changing longevity changes human society - entirely for the better so far. The effect is somewhat delayed in modern times, as people look to their parents for the course of their own life - which is not going to help much in today's world of accelerating biotechnology. We will have access to technologies of engineered longevity that weren't even science fiction twenty years ago. But people are structuring their lives differently to those of their grandparents precisely because they expect to live noticeably longer:

It also may be time to rethink how we structure our lives, Vaupel said. "If young people realize they might live past 100 and be in good shape to 90 or 95, it might make more sense to mix education, work and child-rearing across more years of life instead of devoting the first two decades exclusively to education, the next three or four decades to career and parenting, and the last four solely to leisure."

One way to change life trajectories would be to allow younger people to work fewer hours, in exchange for staying in the workforce to a later age. "The 20th century was a century of the redistribution of wealth; the 21st century will probably be a century of the redistribution of work," Vaupel said.

I've looked at this topic numerous times in the past; you might dig back into the archives and take a look at these posts, for example:

One last note: that we can talk about "allowing" people to work in the context of what government bureaucrats in many regions write into law and enforce by threat of jail - mandatory retirement, for example - is a great iniquity. It is vile that one group of privileged people force their way into the private contracts of others:

Retirement forced on people who are perfectly capable and willing to work is a terrible thing. Only in a dreadfully twisted social environment can more willing workers be transformed from boon into problem. Sadly, most of us live in just such a society, repleat with forced wealth transfers, counterproductive medical regulations, and the tragedy of the commons writ large upon taxed wealth and shoddy government monopoly services. This is what happens when socialist ideas prosper.

ResearchBlogging.orgVaupel, J. (2010). Biodemography of human ageing Nature, 464 (7288), 536-542 DOI: 10.1038/nature08984

Comments

No joke that life extension is going to change up people's career paths!
People mainly work right now in order to save for their unhealthy old age. Without this requirement, people would not feel chained to a job and they could live much more flexibly and happily.

Posted by: William Nelson at April 5th, 2010 11:22 AM

Allow me to work longer? I'm working hard now, so I can retire sooner for longer. Let me out!

Posted by: Ed at April 5th, 2010 1:54 PM

4x faster, please!

Posted by: ras at April 5th, 2010 2:21 PM

An average life span increase of 4 months per year (2.5/10) sounds overly optimistic to me.

Posted by: Tom at April 5th, 2010 2:57 PM

> it might make more sense to mix education, work and child-rearing across more years of life instead of devoting the first two decades exclusively to education, the next three or four decades to career and parenting, and the last four solely to leisure."

Female fertility is still concentrated in years 15-35.

Posted by: Andy Freeman at April 5th, 2010 3:26 PM

Hmm. Let's see. 2.5 years/decade over 170 years. That would be over 17 decades: 17 x 2.5 years = 42.5 years increase since 1840. Life expectancy today for men is maybe 77 years and women 81 years (I'm just guessing, I admit). So in 1840 the average man died at 34.5 and woman at 38.5? Maybe lots of children died back, due to a lack of today's medicines, vaccines, antibiotics, etc. drastically reducing life expectancy. But, these days, I suspect big extensions to life are going to be much, much harder to find.

Wait. I think there was a big bump in life expectancy around World War II, thanks to the widespread use of penicillin & other drugs which I now forget. Since then, it's been a "long hard slog" to see big improvements.

Something about a natural life expectancy built into our genes. Sort of like dogs dying at 10 to 15 years regardless. Humans are programmed at that "so our days may be three score years and ten." And if we're lucky, they'll stretch a little farther.

So, unless somebody is going to modify our DNA, I think this is is a tad bit silly post.

Posted by: Mark Michael at April 5th, 2010 7:02 PM

Humans are programmed at that "so our days may be three score years and ten." And if we're lucky, they'll stretch a little farther. So, unless somebody is going to modify our DNA, I think this is is a tad bit silly post.

Well, yeah, but shh... don't tell anyone about that. You'll burst way too many transhumanist-weirdo bubbles!

The reason that life expectancy is improving is that fewer people are dying as infants/children, and from easily preventable infectious disease. Life expectancies for 75 year olds are not changing by nearly the six-minute-per-day clip. Most of the change is due to basic hygiene and drugs becoming available to more people who previously had no access.

You're going to live 75-90 years. Enjoy it. Don't expect much more.

Posted by: AK at April 5th, 2010 7:34 PM

@AK: The developed nations are well past the big gains in life expectancy at birth due to dealing with infant mortality. That happened a long time ago. More recently the gains in life expectancy have been gains in adult life expectancy due to improved medical technology aimed at chronic disease and the diseases of aging.

For example, life expectancy for the old is increasing at about 4.8 hours per day. See this article for example, noting the rate of increase in remaining life expectancy at 65 in recent years:

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=2984

Posted by: Reason at April 5th, 2010 7:45 PM

@AK "Humans are programmed"

Are you suggesting humans are programmed to die? That an organism that destroyed itself after a certain period of time was better at propagting it's genetic information that one didn't? How would such a thing be selected for?

Posted by: Louis at April 6th, 2010 2:55 AM
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