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I'm looking for a chart which appears in Peter Attia's book Outlive. The chart shows that the only reason that life expectancy in the U.S. has increased since 1920 is because we eliminated 8 infectious diseases via vaccination, antibiotics, and sanitation.
I want to find the original source and study for this chart. The author of the study is Robert J. Gordon.
Where is it? Why is this impossible to find? Google, you suck.
I will add, on top of what @sarker said about massive progress in treating cancer, that you simply can't meaningfully extend human life expectancy beyond about 80 or 90 with our current approach of addressing disease.
The real culprit for why most humans shuffle off the mortal coil is aging, the net outcome of multiple correlated failures of homeostasis and regeneration that plagues our biology. It's a super exponential process, if aging was merely exponential, then we'd have outlier humans who manage to live to 140 or more, instead of being largely capped at 120 even with the most ideal natural genetics.
We've largely solved the issues of infant mortality and infectious disease in the non-senescent, and modern medicine is good enough to keep you chugging with heart disease and the like until your 80s, at which point pretty much everything starts breaking down faster than we can patch it up. At that point, it becomes inevitable that something gets you, your immunity is shot, your organs operating well below nominal abilities, and us doctors are changing the oil and redoing the upholstery till the engine gives out and you come to a screeching halt.
We've grabbed the low-hanging fruit, built some pretty awe inspiring albeit precarious ladders, but the actual solution is to cut the damn tree down at the roots.
I think Peter Attia would agree with you. It's more about thriving at 80 than living to 110. He points out that supercentarians are 9 times rarer than billionaires and are mostly there because of genetics.
That said, life expectancy in the U.S. sucks.
Japan's life expectancy is 85. Monaco is 89.64!
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/life-expectancy-at-birth/country-comparison/
I think most of us have the genes to live to 90-100 with ideal diet and exercise.
I'll quibble in that I think that "thriving" should describe a person who remains at peak health, or far closer to it, than even the healthiest 80 yo. Sure, some of them can be surprisingly vigorous, but they're no spring chickens.
My grandpa, a better doctor and person than I am, made it to 95 (he's still kicking!), and it's only been after Covid lockdowns made him stop his regular private practise that any noticeable cognitive decline took place. He saw patients till 92, and performed surgery till 85.
He did take very good care of himself, being quite austere in terms of lifestyle, eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, even if it's no longer sufficient to keep the worst at bay. I certainly don't do the same, because I'm not remotely as disciplined, and I'm actually content to gamble that advancements in medical science will bail me out of the worst of it in a decade or two.
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