fourscore...

[Mike Salovesh]

Mark:

There's something difficult about the actuarialness of such concepts as
life expectancy. Back in the 1960s, I even got a cance to respond to one of
Ike Asimov's rare howlers when he said words to the effect that "when life
expectancy was only around 35, a 50-year-old was really old and a rarity."

I wrote him from the field. I was living in a community where the local
doctor's figures indicated that the "normal life expectancy" had been
around 35 years at birth as recently as five or six years before I got
there. The doctor's efforts, together with grants from the World Health
Organization and some improvements in the potability of the local water
supply, had raised the local life expectancy almost to 40 years. Even so, I
met lots of local inhabitants who were in their 80s.

When I tried to get details about the past from one 78-year-old woman, she
said "it's a pity my mother isn't here any longer. I have trouble
remembering some of those things you ask about, but she would have known
how to answer." Gee thanks, I said to myself.

Six weeks later she brought her mother over to talk with me. What she meant
by saying that "my mother isn't here any more" was that her mother had gone
to live in an outlying hamlet. Her mother was 102. The old gal was lots
clearer in her head than her daughter, too. When I asked, she named about
half a dozen living people she knew in town who were her seniors. I later
found several of them and was able to confirm their ages.

There were about 6000 people in the community in those days. There was no
paradox in finding so many people over 100 years old when the average life
expectancy had not yet reached 40 years.

The explanation was the appallingly high infant mortality rate. Very close
to half the children born alive in that community died before the age of 5.
Anyone who survived to the age of adultery was highly likely to live a very
long time.  Any woman who survived her childbearing years had to be a tough
old bird indeed.

So for some Indians in San Bartolomé de los Llanos, Chiapas, Mexico life
spans did exceed the psalmist's "threescore years and ten, or even by
reason of strength fourscore" years. Some people lived as much as three
times as long as the AVERAGE life expectancy without changing the average
by that much.  Somewhere around sixty per cent of those born alive never
reached the age of reproduction, and that goes a long way to balancing the
less than one per cent who lived to be a hundred.

Asimov kindly thanked me for my correction. He even appreciated the fact
that I chose to write it in a pastiche of the style of his own articles in
the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I never was able to promote
that to the standing of a "Gotcha!" club: I only caught one other egregious
  (more or less anthropological) error in any other Asimov article. (And
his answer to my correction on that point was even more gracious than his
first.)

I haven't tried writing Safire on this one.

--  mike salovesh     <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>     PEACE !!!

> BTW, Safire got something wrong in his bit about "fourscore" this past
> Sunday. I don't have it in front of me, but he commented, w.r.t. the
> Psalmist's description of the human lifetime, that only in recent
> centuries has life expectancy gotten up even to fifty or so.
>
> Life expectancy is an actuarial concept, derived by statistical analysis
> of how long a person born under given circumstances (e.g., in country X
> in year Y) can expect to live, on the average. That changes drastically
> with war, health, and so on. But the Psalmist was talking about life
> SPAN: how long a person can HOPE to live, or the upper bound on a
> lifetime. It's not statistically calculated, but based on observation
> and experience: If a person isn't killed by violence or disease or
> hardship, how old might he reasonably hope to get to be? "Threescore and
> ten, or by reason of strength fourscore". That hasn't changed.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
>