Comment on US Question. Will the people that have to wait until 70 to get Social Security ever get what they paid in to it back out before they die since men's life expectancy is only 77 now?

• Chobbes@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  To me mean = average, so the two statements are the same.

  Are you talking about median age of death?

  The median is the midpoint of a sample, not the mean.

  When child mortality was very high (pre- 20 century) that was definitely the case. I am not so sure that it is now. I feel that average life expectancy will be a lot closer to 50% survival rate (median age of death) than it was in the past.

  There are still plenty of people who die young, even though child mortality is less of a factor in wealthy countries right now. Plenty of people die in car accidents at a relatively young age, for instance. I’m sure the median and mean aren’t like 10 years off of each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re 3 or even 5 years off.

  source

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, both of us are making assumptions without doing the research.

    So. I respect your opinion but neither of us knows that we are actually correct.

    source

    • Chobbes@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Well, the definition of the mean and median of a sample doesn’t depend on the particular data set, and there’s plenty of non-age related causes of death in the world which would logically skew the distribution to the left! You can look at actuarial tables to see this in action:

      www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

      Male life expectancy at birth in this table is 74.12, but you’ll notice that you don’t get to 50% of the population dying until somewhere between the ages of 78 and 79.

      This website has a pretty good chart showing the skew for a 2019 dataset:

      Image

      source