Health · 1770–2021
A Lengthening Life
For most of human history a newborn could expect about three decades. In two centuries the world more than doubled that, unevenly and against real setbacks.
Life expectancy is a strange, useful fiction. It asks: if the death rates of a single year held for a lifetime, how long would a newborn live? For almost all of history the answer barely moved: around three decades, held down not by old age but by the sheer number of children who never reached it.
Period life expectancy at birth. Hover for exact figures.
Then the line breaks upward. Not evenly, and not without cost. The 1918 influenza pandemic wiped out a century of progress in a single year. But after 1950 something genuinely new happens: antibiotics, vaccines, clean water and oral rehydration reach almost everywhere at once, and the whole world rises together. A child born today can expect more than twice the life of one born in 1800.
The averages hide the real drama. Toggle a country onto the chart and the unevenness appears: the United Kingdom started high and climbed steadily; South Korea began below the world average and, within two generations, overtook it. The gap between the luckiest and unluckiest places to be born has been both the great scandal and the great opportunity of the last century. COVID-19 aside, it has mostly been closing.