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Sigh. This New Yorker article confuses life expectancy with the age most people die. Interestingly, in the print edition it says "most Americans died" while the online version has "many Americans died" in their mid-fifties so they got the message from somewhere but still got the big picture wrong. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/the-future-of-fertility
Life expectancy is *not* the same as the age most people die. If a lot of people die as infants or children (as they did 100 years ago) then the average age of death will be substantially lower.