Abstract
All humans eventually die, but life expectancies differ over time and among different demographic groups. Teasing out the various causes and correlates of death is a challenge, and it is one we take on in this book. A look at the data on mortality is both interesting and suggestive of some possible relationships. In 1900 life expectancies at birth were 46.3 and 48.3 years for men and women respectively, a gender differential of a bit less than 5 percent. Life expectancies for whites then were about 0.3 years longer than that of the whole population, but life expectancies for blacks were only about 33 years for men and women. At age 65, the remaining life expectancies were about 12 and 11 years for whites and blacks respectively.
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References
See Behrman, et al. (1980) and Behrman and Taubman (1989) for methods applied to other subject areas. For mortality and death from specific causes using twin samples, see Hrubec and Ned (1981), Kaprio and Koskenvuo (1990), and Floderus, Cederlof, and Friberg (1988).
Some factors that we include in the environmental category reflect behaviors of governments or other entities, but effectively are given from the point of view of individuals.
Recent medical developments, however, point to increasing future possibilities of interventions to offset an individual’s genetic makeup.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Behrman, J.R., Sickles, R.C., Taubman, P. (1998). Introduction. In: Causes, Correlates and Consequences of Death Among Older Adults. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4393-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4393-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5887-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4393-6
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