The (Surprisingly) Good News on Life Expectancy: It’s Still Going Up
Over the past decade a number of alarming stories have chronicled the decline of U.S. life expectancy in the midst of rising overdose deaths, Covid-19, alcohol-related deaths and suicides.
It turns out there are two ways to measure mortality and life expectancy, and the one you hear about the most paints a misleadingly pessimistic picture of the future. Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said life expectancy, which hit a 25-year low in 2021, climbed to 74.8 years for men and 80.2 for women in 2022, but those were still well below prepandemic levels.
Because this statistic is called “life expectancy at birth," you might assume a child born in 2022 could expect to live that long. You would be wrong.
“I have problems with even calling it ‘life expectancy’ because it’s just misleading," said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official and Social Security Administration adviser now at the Urban Institute think tank. In fact, the best estimates are that a boy born in 2022 will live 82.2 years and a girl 86.5 years, or about seven and six years longer, respectively, than that widely reported life expectancy at birth.
These higher estimates, from the Social Security Administration’s latest annual report, are the longest on record, and continued climbing even during the pandemic. A fictitious life Of the two main techniques to calculate life expectancy, the method in the CDC report is the more common and is known as “period life expectancy." (The Social Security Administration calculates life expectancy with both techniques dating back to 1940; its estimate of period life expectancy closely matches the CDC’s.) “When you see life expectancy reported, about 95% of the time, it’s the period life
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