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 17^th through the 21^st centuries. We show that their average age at death increased only slightly between 1600 and 1900, but in the 20^th 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 20^th and early 21^st 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.