I’m working on a biography of a man who lived in Kentucky during the 1880s, so I was doing some research this morning about what the state was like during that period.

I was shocked by what I learned.

According to one social demographic study I read, children born in Kentucky in the 1880s had a life expectancy of 40 years. In the 1980s, when the study was written, life expectancy at birth was 70 years.

That’s partly because people didn’t live to old age as often, but another factor driving that life expectancy was even more shocking: infant mortality rates.

In 2019, 4.9 children per 1,000 in Kentucky died before the age of six. According to adjusted census figures for 1880, infant mortality in Kentucky in those days was between 150 and 180 deaths per 1,000.

1880 to Today

For comparison, according to UNICEF data, the highest rate of infant mortality in the world in 2020 was in Sierra Leone - at a rate of 80.1 per 1,000 births. In Uganda, where I’ve worked and have many friends, the rate in 2020 was 31.86 per 1,000.

Even one infant death is too many, and it’s unacceptable that the rate in some countries remains so high. But in Kentucky in the 1880s, the number of children dying in early childhood was twice as high as anywhere in the world today.

Looking Back to Look Ahead

The demographer in that study, Thomas R. Ford, found himself optimistic about the prospects for infant mortality and living conditions generally in the developing world. And he was right: In 1982, when Ford was writing, Niger had the highest infant mortality rate in the world - 325 deaths per 1,000. Four decades later, the rate in Niger is 45.61 per 1,000.

Ford also suggested that “those who yearn nostalgically for a return to our agrarian past need to take a second look at the living conditions of that era.” He cautioned that it’s easy (and mistaken) to ascribe modern living standards to past eras, but, based on what he saw in the data, he had “no difficulty in concluding that the 1880s may be an interesting time to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live in them.”

For me, this data is an important reminder of the precariousness of life that the subject of my biography and his contemporaries lived with. I also take heart that some important things have improved in the world in the past 40 or 140 years, and there’s reason to hope they may improve much more.