Originally written May 15th, 2022:
Life expectancy is the key metric for measuring population health, according to Our World in Data. While average life expectancy has improved dramatically across the world over the last century (up 2x+ since 1900), the progress has not been uniform across countries. The difference between the country with the highest and lowest life expectancies, for example, is around 30 years.
In this analysis, we focus on the United States, which has begun to lag behind its peers over the last several decades in life expectancy improvement. This chart uses World Bank data to show life expectancies in the G7 countries over time (the dotted blue lines), the average of the G7 ex-U.S. (the solid blue line), and the difference between the ex-U.S. average and the U.S. itself (in shaded red).
The gap is widening. Americans lived lives only 0.4 years shorter than the rest of the group in 1975, but this spread has widened to 3.8 years as of 2019 (the last data before the Covid-19 pandemic). A variety of reasons could explain this change, but research within the U.S. has convincingly demonstrated that healthier lifestyles lead to longer lives for individuals.