Is the rise in life expectancy in the west coming to an end? If you look at the data it seems so. In March this year Britain’s Office for National Statistics announced something depressing: a slight fall in life expectancy for pensioners — six months for women and four for men.
Overall, life expectancy is still ticking up but at a much slower rate than everyone thought it would — at a time when there is no war on; no nasty new disease on the rampage; and no particular life-shortening social problem evident. Numbers out from the ONS this week show an increase of 0.1 per cent for a child born between 2014 and 2016. There might be 571,245 people in their nineties living in the UK, but current data suggest that most of us will still only make it to our mid-to-late eighties.
This isn’t just happening in the UK. In 2016 life expectancy in the US fell for the first time since 1993 — and the rate of growth has slowed in most other developed countries. The average American woman is now forecast to only just scrape into her eighties — and her husband probably won’t.