That data shows you’re as likely to die at 25, 55 or 75. That sucks.
A bit more likely to die at 40 rather than younger or older. That sucks real bad.
Comment on Medieval people had bathhouses & did not all die before 35...
Ice@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
You’re absolutely right, the majority of people were dead by age 10 (but those who did survive childhood also lived a lot longer than peple think).
trolololol@lemmy.world 4 days ago
square@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Not quite, the chart can be a little confusing.
The blue bars are the total number of people still alive, while the orange bars are the percentage of the original total that die in any given bracket, not the percentage left alive from the last bracket that died.
So the percentage of the total number of people born 25 years ago that die in that bracket is similar to the percentage of the total number of people born 55 years ago that die in that bracket, but the number of people remaining at 55 is more than halved from what it was at 25 so your chances of dying more than double. (And the orange applies to the blue from the last bracket, so the orange 30 are the people from blue 25 that died, but since orange 25 is about the same as 30, and 60 is about the same as 55, that doesn’t change much.) And by 75 that same similar percentage of the original total is almost half the people remaining from 70 (which is why the blue is nearly halved from 70 to 75).
To put it simply, every bracket subtracts the orange from the previous blue. If the orange stays the same while the blue goes down, your chances of dying go up.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 days ago Yup. When I was studying historical economics in college, which was fun as hell, we’d look at expected age at age 20 and compare it to expected age at birth to get a decent estimate of infant mortality. Nowadays they’re about the same, but back then hoo they were very different numbers.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Yeah, I get so tired of people saying things like “there were no old people in the medieval era because everyone died by 30,” and they always say it with so much smugness like they think it’s this controversial quip that nobody knows about and they’re one of the few with this secret knowledge or something.
But it’s so obviously just some “pop factoid” that they read on social media, because any actual historian would give you a more nuanced point of view without conflating averages with absolutes.
Like yeah, a lot of people died untimely deaths back then. But it was by no means all. They fucking invented the word “wizard” to describe old people. Strange thing to do if they had never seen a person with gray hair, wouldn’t you think?