What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? People would not regularly die at 30 in pre-industrial times, and it only looks like that on graphs of average life spans because historians - for some reason - insists on including infant deaths in them. The actual number is ~55-60.

this is a huge bugbear for me!

Oh god so much this. When I studied Irish demographics there were loads of people living into their 60s and 70s and untold legions dying in their first two years. Families would recycle the same names until they ‘took’.

And we also have to balance that against the opposite confusion (increasing life expectancy is *only* about decreasing childhood mortality – which was closer to the truth in mid 20th Century).

📌

This is really interesting.

I love this factoid! Mortality data misuse winds me up

I've tried explaining that in some very unfortunate circumstances. Those statistics are actively used to justify a very gross way of thinking regarding age of maturity and consent in certain places and circles...

Yes, this has always irked me about the life expectancy statistic!

The reason is infants are people and you gotta count them if you want to talk about actual life expectancy. Their lives may be short and pretty boring to study but it's just factually accurate, although it's better to add the context you just gave.

“‘average person dies at 30 years old’ factoid actualy just statistical error. average person dies in old age. Infants Georg, who died of bacterial infection at 0.0005 years old, was an outlier adn should not have been counted”