Analysis ·
The floor rose faster than the ceiling
Since 1960 the best life expectancy in the world has improved by about a decade. The worst has improved by twice that, and the distance between them has closed by a third.
Almost every argument about global development is an argument about averages, and averages are the least interesting thing in this particular dataset. What has changed since 1960 is not mainly the middle. It is the bottom.
| Year | Lowest | Median | Highest | Spread | States |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 28 | 54 | 74 | 46 | 192 |
| 1980 | 30 | 63 | 77 | 47 | 193 |
| 2000 | 45 | 70 | 82 | 37 | 193 |
| 2023 | 54 | 74 | 86 | 32 | 193 |
Between 1960 and 2023 the highest life expectancy in the world rose by 12 years. The lowest rose by 26. The distance between the best-off and worst-off state narrowed from 46 years to 32.
In 1960 there was a country where the average person could expect to live 28 years. There is no longer any country in that position — the worst figure on record today is 54, which is close to the global median of 1960. The floor of the world moved further in sixty years than the ceiling has.
Where the gains were largest
| State | 1960 | 2023 | Years gained |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oman | 35 | 80 | +45 |
| China | 33 | 78 | +45 |
| Maldives | 38 | 81 | +43 |
| Bhutan | 36 | 73 | +37 |
| Yemen, Rep. | 33 | 69 | +36 |
| Timor-Leste | 32 | 68 | +35 |
These are not the countries that dominate development coverage, and the gains are not small adjustments: they are on the order of a second working lifetime added to the average person. Convergence of this size is the largest thing in the dataset and it happens almost entirely out of view, because a rising floor produces no events — only the steady absence of deaths that would previously have happened.
What these numbers are. World Bank estimates of life expectancy at birth, which are modelled from census and registration data of varying quality and are revised. Period life expectancy is not a prediction of how long anyone alive today will live: it is what a newborn would average if the mortality rates of that single year held for their whole life, so it falls sharply during a famine or a war and recovers afterwards, and it is pulled down hard by infant mortality. Much of the gain in the table above is children not dying.
Coverage differs by year — the state count is shown for each — so the lowest and highest figures are the lowest and highest reported, and a state absent from a year cannot set its floor.
Where this page comes from
- World Bank Open Data — CC BY 4.0 · source