Source: Our World In Data
The Dramatic Rise of Life Expectancy Around the World
May 28, 2015 6:30pm by Barry Ritholtz
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Modern medicine, specifically a huge drop in infant mortality and death in childbirth.
The faith healers and vaccine deniers would have us return to the 1700’s and leeches.
A major contributor is also clean water supply and sewage treatment. However, they do require funding.
I think that the key issue is that before Pasteur’s discoveries there wasn’t, simply, a workable description of the laws governing biological phenomena. Thus Homo Sapiens survivability was simply governed by laws of probability, like any other species living on this Earth. Pasteur’s contribution gave the keys to a workable approach to the matter, that is allowed HS to act on the biological phenomena (and thus on himself) in a definite, objective way, leading thus for the first time in HS history to definite, objective consequences. Add to this already enormous power the basic control of ever increasing quantity of energy and you get the operative picture of what happened: one thing is working (and investing resources and manpower) to have clean, pleasant drinking water for its good taste, a different matter is when you know that foul water kills you …
Typically credited to “fattening the tails” of the age distribution: the drop in infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy after 40 or so. Even pre 1920’s or so as long as you made it through infancy you stood almost as good of odds of living to 40 as you do now. Lots of reasons the tails fattened – cleaner water, better medicine, smaller families…