Okay, this drives me nuts. I'm still trying to determine if these people are CONSCIOUSLY and somehow MALICIOUSLY skewing statistics, or if they are just plain morons who don't know what the heck 'n' tarnation they are talking about. Either way, Mojo could do without them.

I was listening to an audio book in the car this morning, and the Authority In Question starts talking about the folks who lived in Olden Days. And they said something along the lines of "You realize, of course, that the life expectancy back then was only around thirty years of age. So if you lived to be in your twenties or thirties, you were considered ELDERLY!"

Gah! Bah! Gasp! Snort! Control, Mojo! Control! Calm blue ocean! CALM BLUE OCEAN!

Okay. I'm calm. Let me explain, in tiny words, that life expectancy statistics are an AVERAGE age, NOT how old people were expected to get. And the REASON why life expectancy was SO SHORT in the days of yore was NOT because people only lived to be thirty. It was because the AVERAGE AGE of when people DIED was thirty. Meaning you take all the infants who died at one year as well as all the elderly who died in their sixties and seventies, and you average it out.

And why was it so gosh-darned low? NOT because people became elderly in their twenties. No, it was because MANY INFANTS DID NOT SURVIVE TO ADULTHOOD. That skews the stats pretty low, should you care to Do The Math. Say you have ten people. Five die before their first birthday, two die in their teens from poking cave bears with pointy sticks, and the remaining three live to be seventy. "Average Life Expectancy" for that group? Twenty-four. Note that DOESN'T mean you are considered "elderly" at twenty-four, it just meant you were a tad smarter and you beat the illness odds in infancy and you learned from your peers NOT to poke a cave bear with a pointy stick.

If you DID survive to adulthood, then chances were so long as you weren't eaten by a dinosaur (okay, people, that's CLEARLY a joke; I mean, SHEESH!) or suffered some other horrible accident or disease, there was a fair chance you'd live to sixty or seventy or maybe even eighty. "Elderly" then is pretty much elderly now. You had less chance of reaching it because life was decidedly tougher back then, and people didn't care for you as much as they do now when you're infirm, but by NO MEANS were you considered ELDERLY when you were in your twenties.

The main reason why life expectancy is better today is simply because we're in the process of mastering the various diseases and accidents that once claimed the lives of people when they were younger. The more children survive to adulthood, the older-skewing the life expectancy stats get. It's as simple as that.

Geez, just read the first couple of books of the Iliad, why don'tcha? Nestor--elderly man, lots of eye-rolling jokes when he starts doing his Abe Simpson routines about how Men Were Men in His Day and not like the wimps NOW. Or the famous Teichoscopia in the third book. THE VIEW FROM THE WALL. You know, the one where all the elderly men of Troy--too elderly to fight in the battle, hmmmm....--meet on the walls of Troy to watch the fight, and Helen comes up and they all start elbowing each other in the ribs and saying stuff along the lines of "Gosh, I sure wish I were younger and not this elderly white-haired dude so I could SO flirt with THAT!"

Or words to that effect; somehow the poetry of Homer gets lost in the translation.

Anyway, if you're just misinterpreting statistics just STOP IT. And if you're just plain STUPID, don't pass yourself off as some sort of authority, okay? Idiot.

Mojo