Social Indicators: Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy

There is a common perception that the quality of life in American society is in decline and has been in decline for some time. Is this perception accurate, and in what ways? If perception doesn't match reality, why? Over the next few weeks, I will write several posts looking at social indicators. After that, I will offer some thoughts about what may be happening in our culture. I hope you will offer your insights and suggest indicators that would help clarify issues.

Here are the first indicators.

Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy

Several factors contribute to having a high quality of life. These include safe environments, adequate diet, adequate health care, sufficient education, adequate financial resources, and nurturing families and communities, to name just a few. It is possible to find measures about each variable, but demographers tend to start with two measures when looking for broad quality-of-life measures. One is the infant mortality rate, and the other is the life expectancy at birth.

The infant mortality rate is the number of children that die from birth to 1 year of age per 1,000 live births. This measure is important because these children are the most vulnerable members of any society. Measuring how well the most vulnerable survive tells us something about a population's overall quality of life.

A second measure is life expectancy at birth. Everyone dies eventually, but a society with a high quality of life will have organized itself to minimize the number of premature deaths in its population.

What do these two measures tell us about American society?

Throughout most of recorded history, the infant mortality rate has been estimated to be about 250 per 1,000 live births. Early in the 1900s, the rate was well over 100 in the United States. The rate appears to have leveled off in recent years, and it remains to be seen if some minimum barrier has been attained.

Life expectancy at birth in the United States in 1900 was just under 50 years. While life expectancy has increased by eight or nine years over the last fifty years, it improved by nearly twenty in the first fifty years of the Twentieth Century. With continued advances in biotechnology, how high this rate may rise remains to be seen.

These two measures illustrate the remarkable advances we have experienced in recent generations due to health care, sanitation, education, workplace reforms, and technology. No populations in the past, and few populations in the present, have experienced the high quality of life Americans enjoy today.

Comments

[will spotts]

I'd be curious how the life expectancy at birth statistic is calculated. Among other things, if this is what it appears at face value, the two statistics would be interrelated. I suspect in the US decreased infant mortality, better nutrition, better water and sewerage would account for most of the increase in longevity -- but that's a gut reaction. I may be way off on how much these factors affect the overall population.

I would suggest that at least two quality of life issues cannot be measured because they are intangible -- and perhaps as people talk about "decreasing" quality of life they are referring to such intangibles.

One is a sense of personal morality. (I caution at this point that I'm not inviting a comparison between burning issues of the early 20th Century versus today -- just the perception that there has been a change in such a sense of morality.) In some ways communities seemed to be stronger then -- both religious and neighborhood. Also extended families remained entact. (Some of this perception change may be attributable to tv/hollywood/internet. For many people the image of ourselves we see projected back at us is unrecognizable. It is not our world, and very few people we know behave in that way.)

Another quality of life issue is a sense of purpose. When survival was a larger component of life, people didn't worry so much about "purpose". They were consumed with the day by day work that had to be done. Beginning especially with the post WWII generation, parents have strived with some success to make sure that their children don't have those worries. (Yes, I know many on the margins have not experienced this change. But, for the majority it seems to have been true.) Now, rather than survival, issues of fulfillment and self-actualization take a larger prominence. A side effect of this is that life often seems to lack a sense of urgency or investment that it would have had in earlier times.

[Michael Kruse]

Will, life expectancy is the average (mean) number of years a person can expect to live starting from a given age, in this case birth. You are exactly right about the infant mortality rates being linked. In nations with high infant mortality the life expectancy sores for one year olds compared to those at birth. You hear that life expectancy was 30-40 in Jesus day but at least 1 in 4 deaths happened in the first year of life. Life expectancy for people who made it to their first birthday would be several years more.

Morality and Purpose. I think you anticipate where I am headed with some of this. I hardly have definitive answers for the trends I see. It does strike me that even something intangible like purposelessness would result in higher rates of suicide and addictions. I would be very interested in reading more about what you see as I get this stuff posted.