(09-23-2013, 01:41 PM)Salty Lake Wrote: What about the lore suggests to you that labor is safe? Â I am not trying to be argumentative, just understand. Â It seems to me there is plenty of dangerous work: adventuring, military positions, mining, piracy, etc.
If we don't want to compare to eras past, how about the recent past? Â According to the US's Social Security Administration, life expectancy at birth in the US was 58 for men and 62 for women for those born in 1930 (this includes infant mortality). Â In FFXIV, are we to presume that magic and alchemy inflate the life expectancy from what it was in a post-industrial first world country? Â Do you believe health care is available to everyone? Â (These are questions for everyone.)
What I'm comparing this to in my head is the coal-mining era, where life-expectancy was considerably truncated by the lack of safety and healthcare. While there is plenty of dangerous work, I don't think it's going to be common-place enough to significantly skew the figures. Most people live in the city-states or surrounding regions, where things are relatively safe and prosperous with the exception be Ul'dah, which has received the refugees from Ala Mhigo and has no place for them.
I'm comfortable looking at the 1930s US; I think it's a worthwhile technology-and-infrastructure analogue even if it's only just that. Answering the last question first, yes, I do think that healthcare would be available to everyone outside of Ul'dah which has a very definite lower class who likely die of poor nutrition and common illness not uncommonly. The lifespan of the refugees, or even the city-state of Ul'dah in general, though, in my opinion wouldn't be enough to pull down the whole of Erozean society.
Finally, I do think that alchemy and magic would bloat the life expectancy of Eorzea. I'm not one to look on Esuna as a panacea or magic as a cure-all, but having powerful alchemy and magics to aide basic medicine must be more effective than having medicine alone. In the very least, adventurers and soldiers that either are healers or stay close to healers will be able to stay active and at full strength until a much more advanced age than would be otherwise possible.
A less pedantic point: SE wouldn't have bothered to tell us that Lalafel could live to be over a hundred if it didn't actually happen from time to time.
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