Comment by mike_hearn

How did you come to believe that the industrial revolution in England caused a drop in life expectancy?

As usual for HN, you do not indicate which passages in the article you cite support your assertion, so I guess I have to do that work for you. "expectancy" occurs 3 times in the article. Correct me if I misunderstand, but I think none of the 3 support your assertion:

>The initial wave of poor health during the industrial revolution gave way to increased life expectancy and decreased levels of infectious disease during the later 19th century, linked to various public health measures.

>By the latter part of the nineteenth century, life expectancy and health improved, and the growing health disparity between rural and urban areas started to decrease.

>Our knowledge of the living conditions of the 19th century, particularly amongst the urban poor, has led to a strong assumption that a significant decline in health occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. We must be cautious not to overly sentimentalise the medieval and early modern periods, when air pollution (primarily from woodsmoke and also sea coal) was common (Brimblecombe, 1976) and adult life expectancy was lower.

That paper appears to be yet another case of social scientists not understanding that correlation isn't causation. They demonstrate a trend in a noisy dataset of some very specific forms of injury and then declare it was the industrial revolution which caused it. But their analysis can't show that.