More Wealth = Longer Life Expectancy?
Look at this correlation..
I was doing some research today into the longest living organisms. Turns out, there are some “biologically immortal” species that do not age! There are also bacteria which can be revived after millions of years. There are colonies of trees that have been living for over 80,000 years. There are individual trees that are aged over 5,000 years old!
Then, there’s us..
The longest living human lived to be 122 years old. But most of us aren’t that lucky. Here’s a map of the world, showing the average life expectancy of a person living in that country:
I looked at this, then continued my work.. until I came across this next map.
That’s odd. Kind of looks like the chart above… Oh, wait. Yep, it does. Obviously, there’s some correlation between these two figures. Just from this map, it looks like the wealthier your country, the longer your life expectancy. Turns out, a Professor from U Penn, by the name of Samuel H. Preston also noticed this, and plotted his data, on “The Preston Curve”.
What it means?
Basically, if your country has a GDP per capita of less than $5,000, your life will (on average) be dramatically shorter compared to the rest of the world.
After GDP per capita of $10,000, the Preston curve just levels off. Meaning, there are diminishing returns for life expectancy. But, this is still a very sad stat for people born in countries whose dots fall to the left of that red line. Millions if not billions of people will live shorter lives as a result of circumstances beyond their control.
Summary
I’d love to dive deeper into this problem.. As I said in the intro, I just noticed this today by accident. If you’re more informed on what’s being done to improve the life expectancy for people on the left side of the that line, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks in advance.
