Mary Campbell also points to some cool tables available from the Social Security Administration. Check out the data here and here, for instance, to observe how infant mortality has plummeted.
UPDATE: Some helpful details, again from Mary Campbell:
In the blog item linking the SSA tables, you might want to indicate which column to look at, and what each column means.
q_x = one-year probability of death at age x
l_x = expected # of people alive at age x, given starting 100K people at birth
d_x = expected # of people dying from age x to x+1, in the population starting with 100K people at birth (obviously, l_(x+1) = l_x – d_x and d_x = q_x * l_x — there’s a lot of redundancy in the mortality tables. These might not work out exactly on this table because of rounding.)L_x and T_x are somewhat complicated, and I’d rather not explain them.
e-circle_x = average number of years left to live from age x
In any case, you see that 737 babies dying in 2000 vs 14,596 dying in 1900 before their first birthdays for boys, and a similar drop in mortality for girls.
By the way, you can’t simply average the rates for boys and girls, or the life expectancies, because naturally (without sex-selecting abortions) more boys are born than girls. I think the natural ratio is 104 boys to 100 girls, or something like that. I don’t have those stats at hand. Once I found an article about how the ratio has changed in places like China… in some areas, where the one-child doctrine is strictly enforced, the ratio can get up to 1.3 to 1, I think. Not very pleasant to think about. Especially as Americans and others are adopting abandoned Chinese girls… But that’s an entirely different issue.
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