The Health Crisis in the USSR*

If we could judge it solely by advances in health, the twentieth century would be a fabulous success. Few of us who take food and doctors for granted realize or appreciate this. In 1900 life expectancy for the whole of the human race was about thirty years. 1 Today it is twice as long: at least sixty-one years, possibly sixty-three or more. 2 Since the human lifespan was probably never much less than twenty for any length of time— to drop much below that level is to court eventual extinction 3 —this means that about three-fourths of the improvement in longevity in the history of our species has occurred in the last eighty years.