Are causes of death factored?
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Life expectancy takes the current death rate at each age and basically adds them up.
For example, suppose people lived a maximum of 10 years, and the death rates looked like this:
* Age 0: 20% death rate.
* Age 1: 1%
* Age 2: 1%
* Age 3: 1%
* Age 4: 2%
* Age 5: 4%
* Age 6: 8%
* Age 7: 16%
* Age 8: 32%
* Age 9: 64%
* Age 10: 100%
Then we could imagine a hypothetical population of people going through all these ages, and see where they die:
* Age 0: 20% of the 100% of original people die -> 20% die at age 0, and 80% live on.
* Age 1: 1% of the remaining 80% of the original total die -> 0.8% of the original total die at age 1, and 79.2% live on (I’m going to round to one decimal place from here out)
* Age 2: 1% of 79.2% of the original total die -> ~0.8% of the original total die at age 2 (technically 0.792), and 78.4% live on
* Age 3: 1% of 78.4% die -> ~0.8% die, 77.6% live on
* Age 4: 2% of 77.6% die -> 1.6% die, 76.1% live on
* Age 5: 4% of 76.1% die -> 3.0% die, 73.0% live on
* Age 6: 8% of 73.0% die -> 5.8% die, 67.2% live on
* Age 7: 16% of 67.2% die -> 10.7% die, 56.4% live on
* Age 8: 32% of 56.4% die -> 18.1% die, 38.4% live on
* Age 9: 64% of 38.4% die -> 24.6% die, 13.8% live on
* Age 10: All of the final 13.8% die.
And then we average out how long everyone lived. In this example, we get 0.2 * 0 + 0.008 * 1 + 0.00792 * 2 + … + 0.246 * 9 + 0.138 * 10 from each of the death amounts at each age, for a life expectancy of ~6.4 years.
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