Mortality change roils period rates. In the short term, conventional calculations of age-specific probabilities of death and life expectancy in the period immediately after the change depend on how many lives have been saved. In the long term, the probabilities and period life expectancy also...

Life expectancy is overestimated if mortality is declining and underestimated if mortality is increasing. This is the fundamental claim made by Bongaarts and Feeney (2002) in their article "How Long Do We Live?", where they base their claim on arguments about "tempo effects on mortality". This...

In a stationary population, the change with age in some characteristic at a point in time, summed over all the individuals in the population, equals the change in this characteristic, from the start to the end of the lifetime of each individual, averaged over all lifetimes of the individuals in...

It is well known that life expectancy can be expressed as an integral of the survival curve. The reverse - that the survival function can be expressed as an integral of life expectancy - is also true.

Vaupel (1998) posed the provocative question, “When it comes to death, how do people and flies differ from Toyotas?†He suggested that as the force of natural selection diminishes with age, structural reliability concepts can be profitably used in mortality analysis. Vaupel (2003) went...

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