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I tried to post this in another thread, but the thread was locked by the time I did. I don't think this post is very controversial; the mods can lock it if they like:
The life expectancy of past presidents is not that good an example of how long the rich could expect to live, because a lot of 19th and early 20th century mortality was due to death in childhood. By definition, no president could have died in childhood, so that automatically increases their average life expectancy by quite a lot. It would be more appropriate, as an example of life expectancy in the upper classes, to look at the life expectancy of presidents' children. I have no idea what that was; but for example, Abraham Lincoln had four children of whom only one survived to adulthood.
I suspect that the life expectancy among presidents and other upper-class people has also increased - given that of the last 5 ex-presidents, 2 died at 93 and 2 are still alive and active at the age of 84 (Clinton is still relatively young).
Among the British Royals, Queen Elizabeth is well into her 80s, and her mother famously lived to 101. But 19th and early 20th century monarchs tended to die in their late 60s or early 70s, with exceptions in both directions: Queen Victoria lived to be 81; George VI, the Queen's father, died at 56. Certainly they lived longer than the average for the time, but they seem to be living longer now. Note that the succession crisis that led to bringing the Hanoverians over from Germany in the early 18th century was precipitated by the fact that not only did Queen Anne die at 49, but none of her five children, who survived birth, lived to adulthood.
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