We all know how to convert from dog years to human years. You take the age and multiply by a number (8 usually). This is designed to give you a better perspective on how long dogs can expect to live or mature. However, this is actually a poor way to do it because the relative ages don’t scale linearly. Some people have tried to come up with a better systems that fit the data better but its difficult — the data just isn’t there for expected life of different dog breeds.

It is, however, there for humans. There is actually a lot of really good data on how long humans live. So using this (specifically this one) I tried to see how old different races are relative to each other. The process works like this — you take a subgroup such as white male. You input an age, say 22. Then you see what percent of white males are alive at that age. With this life percentage you then see where it falls in other subgroups.

So: the data. To start, here is a graph showing the percent of people who are alive at each age

And here is the most interesting one to me, the relative ages. Here is the comparative life table compared to the total

So what does this mean? It means for an average 50 year old the same risk of death would have occurred for males at 47.9, females at 55.0, white all at 52.6, white males at 48.5, white females at 57.6, black all at 42.7, black males at 36.0 and black females at 47.4.

Here are the same graphs for males, females, white all, white males, white females, black all, black males and black females.

Here is the code used to make this. It basically just takes the percent and then linearly interpolates where that percentage fits on other data sets. Written in MATLAB and poorly commented (sorry).