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:
“We shall make mistakes, but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principles. I remember that my old school master Dr. Peabody said in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, he said things in life will not always run smoothly, sometimes we will be rising toward the heights and all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great thing to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“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)