20,000 days: a history of life expectancy
Throughout history, life expectancy (LE) has been around 30 years, sometimes lower, e.g. with the adoption of agriculture, plague, or cramming the new industrial working class into slums (described in Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England; he called their accelerated deaths “social murder”). Marx predicted increasing immiseration of the working class relative to the ruling class so it is doubtful whether he could have predicted what would actually happen to all classes, LE more than doubling in under 200 years, an average extra 20,000 days of life.
Source: workersliberty.org
