I am preparing a kind of family tree for our children so that they know where they came from. In my family I am the only survivor, although my brother and sister died recently they were both in their seventies (a story I told already).
It was a fun process, but it provided more than that. First, I married relatively young I was 26 when I married and nearly 30 when our first child was born. I was looking at my ancestors. On my mother's side, she had 6 siblings, Four died before the age of 30, two in war, and two from illnesses. Only she and a single sister survived. The two boys had a child each but they died in WWII, and the other sister died as an infant. what is interesting is that every one of my mother's siblings had children in their early 20s. I know that my mom was hardly 20 when my brother was born.
What is remarkable is that among our friends, we are the only ones to have four children. There is only 7 years between the eldest and the youngest. That story is the same for my wife's family. Again two generations back, they had many children and several died young.
In our circle of acquaintances, we only have one friend who lost a child, it was to cancer some years ago. What was remarkable was not that people live much older, as they do, but that children no longer die. What was 80 years ago a death sentence is no longer that.
The reason I mention this is that this changes demographics dramatically. The pyramid is no more, rather it is a cylinder, where the vast majority of the population survives to their 70s now. The distribution of age of death has thinned. The odds of you surviving to your 40th birthday if you were born in 1990 was around 50%, if you were born in 1980, your odds of surviving beyond your 40th birthday were around 95%. That changes society.
Why does this matter, every year the average Britton death rises, in the 1950s it was 65, and by 2010 it was 78. The difference is not only the higher number it's the population at that number. This will change health care, education and fiscal policy.
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