The longevity of famous people from Hammurabi to Einstein

Abstract

We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive biographical tool. Our main contribution is fourfold. First, we show, using for the first time a worldwide, long-running, consistent database, that there was no trend in mortality rates during the Malthusian era. Second, after correcting for selection and composition biases, we date the beginning of the steady improvements in longevity to the cohort born in 1640-9, clearly preceding the Industrial Revolution. Third, we find that this timing of improvements in longevity concerns most countries in Europe, as well as all types of skilled occupations. Finally, the reasons for this early increase in mean lifetime are related to age-dependent shifts in the survival law.JEL Classification Numbers: J11, I12, N30, I20, J24.

Population and the Environment: The Role of Fertility, Education and Life Expectancy

“…A Derivation of optimal choices, as in Equations (8), (9) and (10) After replacing (2) and 3 We then have to solve the system composed by the following first-order conditions:…”

“…Otherwise, we are in a corner solution, with agents choosing not to invest in education (e t = 0). In the lower part of Equations (8), (9) and 10, we report the optimal choices associated to an interior solution for e t , which can be immediately obtain from the first-order conditions specified above. In the case of corner solution, we must replace e t = 0 in the agents' budget constraint, and re-optimize with respect to n t and m t only.…”

“…We also assume that η ∈ (0, 1), such that environmental quality can be regarded as a stock (see among others, Mariani et al, 2010; Palivos and Varvarigos, 2017; and Gerlagh et al, 2018). 9 Note also that we make the simplifying assumption that people do not consume as old and as children. Introducing this possibility in the model would bring about further analytic complications, without significantly altering the qualitative results of our analysis.…”

Key forces behind the decline of fertility: lessons from childlessness in Rouen before the industrial revolution

“…With regard to the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity, we use the database of famous people built by de la Croix and Licandro (2015). This database includes famous people that appear in the encyclopedias and dictionaries upon which the Index Biobibliographicus Notorum Hominum is built.…”

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

“…We also measured the heaping index, a measure of the extent to which dates are rounded to the nearest 5-or 10-year value (calculated as the number of dates in a time period ending in 5 or 0 minus the number of dates in that time period divided by 5, a value that varies between 1 [unbiased] and 5 ref. 53 ). Prior to 1600, the heaping index analysis showed that birth dates were frequently rounded to the nearest 5 or 10 years (so that, for example, 1553 might be recorded as 1550 or 1555).…”