Prosper and Live Long: Productive Life Span Tracks Increasing Overall Life Span Over Historical Time among Privileged Worker Groups

Abstract

Life expectancy has increased continuously for at least 150 years, due at least in part to improving life conditions for the majority of the population. A substantial part of this historical increase is due to decreases in early life mortality. In this article, we analyze the longevity of four privileged sets of adults who have avoided childhood mortality and lived a life more similar to the modern middle class. Our analysis is focused on writers and musicians from the 17th through the 21st centuries. We show that their average age at death increased only slightly between 1600 and 1900, but in the 20th century increased at around 2 years/decade. We suggest that this confirms that modern life span extension is driven by delay of death in older life rather than avoidance of premature death. We also show that productive life span, as measured by writing and composition outputs, has increased in parallel with overall life span in these groups. Increase in age of death is confirmed in a group of the minor British aristocracy and in members of the US Congress from 1800 to 2010. We conclude that both life span and productive life span are increasing in the 20th and early 21st century, and that the modern prolongation of life is the extension of productive life and is not the addition of years of disabling illness to the end of life.

Intellectual maturity and longevity: late-blooming composers and writers live longer than child prodigies

“…A more detailed description of the dataset and its compilation can be found in his initial publication [20]. In short, the dataset provided to us had been compiled by manual extraction of biographical information from The Oxford Companion to Music [21], which contains historical information on musical composers and musicians, and The Oxford Companion to English Literature [22], which contains historical information on creative writers and others involved in publishing.…”