Regardless, it's clear that a significant portion of the life expectancy gap is caused by car accidents, firearms, and drugs.

What does life expectancy include?

Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time an organism is expected to live, based on the year of its birth, its current age, and other demographic factors including sex. The most commonly used measure is life expectancy at birth (LEB), which can be defined in two ways.

How is life expectancy calculated?

When we can track a group of people born in a particular year, many decades ago, and observe the exact date in which each one of them died then we can calculate this cohort's life expectancy by simply calculating the average of the ages of all members when they died.