PEOPLE born today won’t live as long as was thought, thanks to a statistical flaw in the way life expectancy is calculated. American women will die an average of one year and seven months earlier than expected, and the French more than two years sooner.
John Bongaarts of the Population Council in New York City has discovered that equations used for two centuries to calculate life expectancy do not take into account trends in the data. For example, better healthcare tends to extend lifespan, leading to an overestimate of people’s life expectancies (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, DOI:…
