Demography is cool generally, but life tables are really cool in their elegance. Don’t know what a life table is? Let me ‘splain.

A life table uses data from private or public death registers, or even genealogical records, to identify a variety of survival and death estimates. Briefly, the tables include for each age:

• Probability of death in the next year
• Probability of surviving to the age
• The life expectancy

There is more in the tables, but these are the big items that people often want to know. All of the various table columns can be calculated from survival rates. The US government and the UN each has created many such tables for a variety of time, locations, and development details. For example, the earliest and most dependable one is from 1901 and includes separate tables by race, sex, migrant status, urbanity, and even for some specific states.

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