Dr George Leeson
speaker
20 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2012
last heard Oct 2012
Dr George Leeson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What we would expect to find with ages at death is that we would have
what we call a normal distribution.
This is a nice bell-shaped curve.
So we would have most people congregated around the middle observations and then we'd have some small numbers usually out at the extremes.
And we do have that for both of these groups of mothers.
However, if you like, the US curve has moved further to the right so that, as your listener pointed out, we've got more people in the distribution area
who are reaching 100 in their 90s in the US, simply because the curve has all moved to the right.
So we're fairly sure that the difference in the average is real.
We are, yes, and it is a small number of observations, but we can begin to look at other things where we might want to get a more clear picture of what is actually happening, because, of course...
There are a number of things that affect your age at death, what we call life expectancy.
And one of them, of course, is the time in which you are born.
For every decade, going back to the 1840s, when we have our first mother born, to the 1940s, when we have our last mother born, for every decade, the life expectancy of that cohort of women in the UK...
is higher than the life expectancy for that cohort in the United States.
The UK mothers of prime ministers are outliving their peers quite significantly.
The US mothers are also outliving their peers.
However, the US mothers are living much longer than the comparable cohorts of UK Prime Minister's mothers.
For African presidents, they will, before they become elected as president, have lived a relatively disadvantaged life.
So once they get into the presidential office, even though they will be living a lifestyle far, far, far removed from that of their fellow citizens...
which would increase their life expectancy in relation to those fellow citizens even more.
But they do have an accumulated, disadvantageous lifestyle, which they have to pay back on at some time.
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