The evolution of mortality through the demographic transition is as close as we come to a deterministic process in the analysis of population dynamics. Science and technology have become increasingly better at keeping people alive, a benefit that still seems to drive the human experience to this day. It’s possible to identify milestones through history such as the development of modern sanitation to defeat contagious air- and waterborne illnesses, the development of vaccines for specific illnesses, as well as overall technological development in the field of healthcare. It is a story about pinning down the causality between rising national income and technological development and the improvement in the human living condition in the past 250 years. Researchers still debate the relative importance and merits of specific drivers, but it’s possible to generalize, all the same. The story about of human mortality is contained in a few relationships, for the individual, between, and possibly within countries. It is a story about Nike swoosh-shaped, logarithmic and asymptotic curves, and the extent to which we observe deviations from such stylized relationships over time, and why.
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