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Originally Posted by Caymus
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The datasets at the site in the link are difficult to use and can lead to a lot of misunderstanding as most of the data is for "death rates" which are the data for the expected deaths in each year's age group per 100,000 people.
If you hunt through the link, you'll find a "life expectancy" table for sex and race by year of birth. As an example, I was born in 1944. Our son was born in 1975 and, in his year of birth, he had five years of expected additional life compared to mine when I was born. These expected additional years continued to increase in each successive year up to "covid", due to factors such as greater access to health care, improvement in medicine, vaccinations, safer automobiles, and, more importantly, the dramatic reduction in smoking.
What is more interesting, and what I can't find in the cited link, is a dataset which shows the increase in additional years of life for each group by birth years. Put another way, for the group born in each year, their additional years of expected life did not remain constant but steadily increased from what it was in their year of birth. This was due to the removal of people in the group who did of childhood diseases, military service etc. as well as the factors noted in the last paragraph such as better health care, reduced smoking, and safer automobiles. This increase continued until "covid" resulted in a small reduction. This means that the annual increase in each year's additional years of life will show a significant increase in the coming years as those who contracted covid die off.
Understanding "death rates" and "life expectancy" is very complicated. Actuaries pore over the government's statistics with fine tooth combs in order to provide information to those in charge of setting premiums for medical insurance, life insurance, and annuities. However, they make mistakes, such as noted by the RP about Social Security, by failing to note the large increase in the additional years of life for those in our generation. This resulted in a combination of too little being collected by the FICA tax along with too generous entitlements being passed out for political purposes. The greatest mistake was when Lyndon Johnson "converted" the Social Security trust fund to a piggybank which he could spend to finance both the Great Society and the Vietnam war, thereby making Social Security benefits just a regular budget item to be fought over each year in Congress.