Ah, Truth

One of my many pet peeves with the right wing set is that they claim the increase in life expectancy since the beginning of Social Security is proof positive that SS is unsustainable. Just look at how many years have been added!!!!!! Well, as has been reported here a number of times, life expectancy increase, measured from any time before about 1960 (and any place), is not due to people of 60 or so living all those many years longer. Au contraire! It's been that young folks, from birth, now make it through young adulthood standing up. Vaccines and sulfa drugs and cleaner water and a host of other public health measures mean that an American baby in 2018 is better off than an American baby born in 1932. But not better than most OECD countries.

Here is a fellow thinker.

Life expectancy is calculated directly from death rates. And mathematically speaking, changes in infant mortality have a much greater impact on life expectancy than do changes in death rates in any other year.

Or, put more starkly:

More realistically, if death rates in the first year went up to 250 out 1,000 (which would be around the worst current day level, but well within historical ranges), life expectancy comes down from 79 to around 50, despite death rates at all other ages staying the same as in 2015 France.