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.
Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 10 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.
Chobbes@lemmy.world 10 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:
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