This book studies the experience of twelve countries that have broken through the limits that low incomes so often impose on human survival: China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Oma
Between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy at birth rose from about 30 years to a global average of 67 years, and to more than 75 years in favored countries. This dramatic change, called the health transition, is characterized by a transition both in how long people expected to live, and how they expected to die. The most common age at death jumped from infancy to old age. Most people lived to know their children as adults, and most children became acquainted with their grandparents. Whereas earlier people died chiefly from infectious diseases with a short course, by later decades they died from chronic diseases, often with a protracted course. The ranks of people living in their most economically productive years filled out, and the old became commonplace figures everywhere. Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History examines the way humans reduced risks to their survival, both regionally and globally, to promote world population growth and population aging.
Poverty and Life Expectancy is a multidisciplinary study that reconstructs Jamaica's rise from low to high life expectancy and explains how that was achieved. Jamaica is one of the small number of countries that have attained a life expectancy nearly matching the rich lands, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. Why this is so is the Jamaica paradox. This book provides an answer, surveying possible explanations of Jamaica's rapid gains in life expectancy. The rich countries could invest large sums in reducing mortality, but Jamaica and other low-income countries had to find inexpensive means of doing so. Jamaica's approach especially emphasized that schoolchildren and their parents master lessons about how to manage disease hazards. This book also argues that low-income countries with high life expectancy, such as Jamaica, provide more realistic models as to how other poor countries where life expectancy remains low can improve survival.
Three grand themes characterized the twentieth century: crises on a scale that outstripped any in human history; revolutionary ideology and action that brought social and political transformations on
