Fun with Demographics: Life Expectancies Around the World

EVENT

From Facts-on-File. Estimated life expectancy from birth, calculated as a median of the total population.

EUROPE: Western Europe: 78
AMERICAS: North America: 77
EUROPE: Northern Europe: 77
EUROPE: Southern Europe: 77
OCEANIA: 74
AMERICAS: Central America: 73
ASIA: East Asia: 72
AMERICAS: South America: 70
AMERICAS: Caribbean: 68
EUROPE: Eastern Europe: 68
ASIA: Western Asia: 68
AFRICA: Northern Africa: 66
ASIA: Southeast Asia: 66
ASIA: South Central Asia: 61
AFRICA: Southern Africa: 52
AFRICA: Western Africa: 51
AFRICA: Eastern Africa: 50
AFRICA: Central Africa: 48

It's tempting to read too much into a simple chart like this; for example, every region includes a number of individual nations and hundreds of millions to over a billion people.
In some cases, individual nations drastically effect the results. In the case of Oceania for example, Australia (79) balances against dozens of small Pacific archipalagae (~upper 60s) to create an artificial "median" that suggests a society less prosperous/healthy than most of Europe, but more prosperous than most of the Americas. China alone almost obliterates huge discrepancies with Japan and Mongolia, which represent a 13 year spread themselves. And the fact that East Asia is ten times as populous as Southern Africa cannot avoid distortion. Lastly, some of the regional designations seem arbitrary. For example, the United Kingdom was put together with the Scandenavian nations in Northern Europe as opposed to with France, Germany, and the rest of Western Europe. From the standpoint of culture, health, history and politics, this seems erroneous.

All that aside, however, it is possible to see that there is a substantial regional bias in life expectancy; that despite whatever counterbalances there are between the more and less prosperous nations in any one region, there is still a sharp regional difference in standard of livings. The top three regions are all within a year of each other, for example, and when oceans are included, are coterminous. Africa, on the other hand, exclusively occupies the four lowest ranking positions, with four out of five of her regions represented, and a nine year spread between the median life expectancy of the fourth and fifth ranked regions.

The total spread, from Western Europe to Central Africa is thirty years. The average resident of Central Africa will live less than 62% as long as the average resident of Western Europe.

END OF POST.