Contemporary Society - Life Expectancy

Life Expectancy

In 1960, the average life expectancy of the world population was 50 years. Forty-five years later, in 2004, life expectancy had improved by over 30% to 67 years. Improvements in health care and the reduction in child mortality have led to a jump forward in middle-income countries, where life expectancy is now over 70 years. In high-income countries life expectancy is now over 80 years, extending well beyond the traditional length of working life, causing social and economic problems.

Read more about this topic:  Contemporary Society

Famous quotes containing the words life and/or expectancy:

    Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.
    —W.E. (William Ewart)

    If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
    Muriel Spark (b. 1918)