The 28-year life-expectancy gap is down to 16

In 1960, life expectancy at birth was 69.9 years in North America and 41.4 years in sub-Saharan Africa — a gap of 28.5 years between the world's luckiest and unluckiest regions. It was the cruelest single fact in the global ledger: the length of a life, set mostly by where it began. Sixty-four years of data later the fact is still true. It is just much smaller.

By 2024 the gap had narrowed to 16.4 years, and the arithmetic of the narrowing is the point. North America added about nine years over the period; sub-Saharan Africa added more than twenty-one. The convergence came almost entirely from the bottom rising, not the top stalling — vaccines, antibiotics, clean water and the collapse of child mortality doing quiet, compounding work.

The regional record belongs to East Asia, which gained 35 years over the period, from 41.7 in 1960 to 76.7 in 2024. China embodies the run: from 33.4 years in the famine year of 1960 to 78.0 today, statistically shoulder to shoulder with the United States at 78.9. The world average, meanwhile, crossed 70 in 2008 and now stands at about 73.5 — more than twenty-two years longer than in 1960.

Sixty-four years of medicine and plumbing bought back twelve of the twenty-eight years that geography once stole.

Honesty requires the other half of the ledger. Sub-Saharan Africa's 62.8 years in 2024 still falls seven years short of what North America already had in 1960 — on this yardstick, the region runs more than six decades behind. And the same halving shows up between income groups, where the high-income-to-low-income gap fell from 27.1 years to 15.2. The pattern is global. So is the unfinished business.