Perspective on Progress, Part 1

Yesterday I asked for everyone’s feedback regarding measures or indicators of human wellbeing. While it’s difficult to measure wellbeing directly, there are certainly some factors that correlate with it.

Once such factor mentioned, though admittedly somewhat of a crude one, is life expectancy.

As recently as 1760, life expectancy in even the wealthiest nations was less than 30 years (where scholars estimate it had remained for several hundred if not thousands of years previously). Presently it stands above 70 years for most of the world and above 80 in some places. The rapid improvement in life expectancy started just after The Enlightenment and continues to this day.

We currently add about a quarter year of life expectancy for every year lived, meaning that we are really only approaching death at about three quarters of the assumed rate. Some noted futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, predict that, within the next few decades (and thanks to gene therapy, nanotechnology and other developing interventions), we’ll be adding MORE than a year of life expectancy for each year lived. At that point, barring accidents and murders, humans may be mostly immortal.

Life expectancy has improved both by adding years to the back end and saving years on the front end. At the time of the founding of the United States, only about 250 years ago, between three and four out of every ten children born died before their fifth year of life, and that’s in Sweden, one of the wealthiest and healthiest countries of the age. Anthropologists estimate that one in five children in the much romanticized hunter-gatherer cultures died within their FIRST year of life.

Then, starting in the late 1800s, infant mortality began to rapidly decline by more than 100 times and today stands at a fraction of a percentage point in developed countries.

As recently as the late 1800s, nearly 1 percent of European pregnant women died in childbirth. Today that percentage is 0.004 percent and falling.

(The statistics above are from Harvard Professor Steven Pinker’s tome “Enlightenment Now”, truly a “must read” for anyone looking for some perspective on the arch of human progress).