Foolishness

Today I am going to talk about one of my favorite rants as a history teacher. I am sure all of you at some time in your life have heard a teacher say something like "A 30 year old man in the middle ages was considered OLD.", or, "40 back then was like 80 today."

Today I went to a website on retirement and got the following.

A look back in history reveals that Neanderthals lived but 20 years and the classic Greeks and Romans enjoyed only a brief 28 years on Earth... If you lived in medieval England, you had an average of 33 years, a figure that rose only to 37 by the late 19th century.

This is of course accurate but at the the same time it is totally misleading. Everyone did not die off at 28 in ancient Greece. And in medieval England it was not at all uncommon for people to reach the biblical measure of "three score and ten".

So where does the confusion arise? It is "Average life expectancy" AVERAGE. That means they take an estimate of everyone born and figure this on when they die. People fail to understand that word AVERAGE. (Math is an evil thing.)

If for example you took ten people and 6 of them lived to be 70 and 4 died at birth the average life of the group was 42 years. This despite the fact that the majority of them lived to be 70. So what skews the numbers so low? In a word, infant mortality. (ok, two words) When a bunch of babies die the AVERAGE goes way down. In medieval Europe if you managed to live through childhood you had a pretty good chance of making the late sixties and seventies. Just like today.

Averages are statistics and statistics lie. Afterall, the "average" high temperature in Georgia is "below 88 degrees" according to the Georgia Tourism board. Anyone who has been in South Georgia in August knows how true that isn't.