So this is it...we're going to die

[andrewducker]

I was reading the Hacker News discussion of yesterday's link on death and doctors' views on it, and came across this comment which highlighted how small the gains in lifespan over the last hundred years are.

Basically, if you were 65 in 1900 then on average you had 12 more years to live. In 2007 you had 19 more years to live*. If you were 85 then you've gone from 4 more years to 6 more years.

So that's an addition of 7 years and 2 years. Which doesn't seem like very much, particularly as I keep hearing about how much better modern life expectancy is.

Does anyone have any better stats than that? Or any stats for life extension gains in other countries than the US?




*That has to be an estimate, what with it not being 2026 yet.

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Two thoughts occur to me – neither I fear particularly novel.

If the nibbling is actually closer to biting then I and my two year old son (more so) should prepare ourselves for a significantly longer life – not just pensions but careers, paying for housing costs and assumptions about the amount of change we might see in our lives. I’m expecting gerontology to get a huge boost when the Chinese and Indians get up to speed and have a larger aging population of their own and start spending their money on the study of aging.

Secondly, for populations that are currently still not very devoloped and having problems with child mortality etc they are going to get all of these medical and public health advances in a oner and from an average life expectancy in the 40’s with 50% child mortality to life expectancy in the 90’s with child mortality in the low 0.1% (hopefully sooner rather than later).

[steer.livejournal.com]

If the nibbling is actually closer to biting then I and my two year old son (more so) should prepare ourselves for a significantly longer life – not just pensions but careers, paying for housing costs and assumptions about the amount of change we might see in our lives.

Now this relates to a big lie we've been sold time and again -- that pension companies have no idea about what life expectancy will be. In fact, there is a vast amount of information about this and most of the ``data" about life expectancy that people discuss (life expectancy at birth right now for example) is ``projected". So, when we say something like, "life expectancy at birth in Kensington and Chelsea right now is 89.8 years" then that is actually a prediction, it's not based on the average ages at which people died but based on ``mortality" at each age.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/life-expec-at-birth-age-65/2004-06-to-2008-10/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-Local-area-life-expectancy

(In fact, this particular model is ``data driven" in that it is not really a prediction about how long people born now will live but is a prediction about how long people born now would live if they experienced the mortality rates right now. There's no predictive element -- other models add predictive element to how those mortality rates will move.)

The model which actually tries to predict this is known as "cohort life expectancy" -- here's an actuarial table for it from a US source
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2011/lr5a4.html
You can see how they expect life expectancy at 65 to progress as well (they give three tables with upper and lower bound expectations).

In fact, for a pensions company, predicting how long someone will live is the ``easy" part of that sum. It's a well understood science, sure it's not easy in the sense that you or I could do it without months or years of training and data analysis but it's a heck of a lot easier than working out how the economy will go over the 40-100 year horizon to pay for it. So, for pensions projections, the part of that sum which is hard to do is not working out how long you will live but is working out how much you need to invest to get the lifestyle you want at the end of it.

Whenever you view any information about the pensions crisis and aging population then view it within the context that a lot of time and energy and brainpower has been spent predicting these things and the models have proved pretty good.

It could be that significant effects will knock the aging models out slightly... but an estimate of the progress of mean lifespan within 5% over 100 years (given no apocalyptic events) is not so difficult compared with working out the return on a £10,000 investment over the same timespan.

for populations that are currently still not very devoloped and having problems with child mortality etc they are going to get all of these medical and public health advances in a oner and from an average life expectancy

Sure -- life expectancy in the developing world is still driven by child mortality right now. This will increase faster than life expectancy in the west until they have the aging population problem that we have.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I did my accountancy traineeship with one of the world's largest Life Assurance and Pensions companies.

Some of these concepts are ringing bells with me.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm probably slightly preaching to the choir then. Your company would probably just work from a standard set of tables for estimated life expectancy which includes a model of how that grows over time.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Something like that.

I confess at the time I was there I was paying more attention to chatting up the actuarial trainees than listening to the discussions on actuarial methods from the old boys.