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Demography

Greater lifetime expectations

Nature volume 405, pages 744–745 (2000)Cite this article

For early humans, the average lifespan was around 20 years, as estimated from skeletal remains. Now, in several industrialized countries, it is about 80 years. Much of this increase has happened in the past 150 years. But it was widely expected that as life expectancy became very high and approached the ‘biological limit of human longevity’, the rapid ‘mortality decline’ would slow down and eventually level off.

Such a deceleration has not occurred yet. On page 789 of this issue, Tuljapurkar et al.1 show that during the second half of the twentieth century, age-specific death rates in the G7 industrialized countries — the United States, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom — continued to decline at a remarkably constant pace. There was no noticeable sign of a slowing down. This report follows one by Wilmoth2, published two years ago, which indicated that the mortality reduction in the United States, measured by the age-standardized death rate, was even faster in the second half of the century than in the first half.

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Figure 1: Official medium-variant forecasts of life expectancy in the G7 countries in 2050 compared with the forecasts of Tuljapurkar et al.1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, Box 20, New York, 10021-6399, New York, USA

    Shiro Horiuchi

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  1. Shiro Horiuchi
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Correspondence to Shiro Horiuchi.

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Horiuchi, S. Greater lifetime expectations. Nature 405, 744–745 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35015642

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