Bob W wrote:
Yes. A more informative statistic might be life expectancy at age 5.
However, there are still parts of the world where a man in his early 40s can
expect to be addressed as 'grandfather'. I know from experience...
--
Cheers,
Bob
Yeah, in a pickup bar in Southern California... I guarantee it!
keith whaley
But it's just a somewhat amusing piece of statistics, anyhow...
On a related note, another common misconception is that
nobody did live to the age of 65 a few hundred years ago,
because the life expectancy at birth was 40 or whatever. The
truth is that the main contribution to the lower life
expectancy was a very high child mortality rate - the chance
of getting old *if you survived childhood* wasn't necessarily
that much lower than today.
- Toralf
