Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

So, how long have we got?
Pension experts say we must work longer because we are living longer. But who
knows how long we have left? Dave Grimshaw, actually. Tim Dowling met him
Tim Dowling
Thursday December 1, 2005

Guardian
Man is said to be the only animal capable of contemplating his own mortality -
indeed, for some of us it's a miracle we find time to do anything else - but
rarely do we stop to reflect upon the problems that arise from insufficient
mortality, from our increasing national reluctance to die on time. Not only are
we living longer, we're living longer than we'd ever imagined we would, and
this, apparently, is nothing to smile about.

In response to the increase in life expectancy, Lord Turner's report on
pensions, published yesterday, has suggested, among other things, that the state
pension age should rise gradually from 65 to 68 by 2050. But who really knows
how long we'll all be living in 2050? And how do they know?

The people who hold the best available answer to the question "When am I going
to die?" are not doctors or scientists; they're actuaries, those anonymous
mathematicians who toil in the service of insurance companies, compiling
statistics and supplying and interpreting the risk tables upon which the
calculations of annuities, premiums, dividends and reserves are based. And if
you want specific information about mortality, you would do best to consult
those scrupulous tabulators of death statistics who supply data to insurers and
pension fund managers under the auspices of the Continuing Mortality
Investigation (CMI). The CMI is funded by insurance houses, who pool their data
on death and dying in order to get an overall idea about the future of
mortality.

CMI executives are all volunteers, but the work of its "secretariat" is
currently outsourced to an actuarial firm called Barnett Waddingham, and it is
here, in an anonymous modern office building in Cheapside, London, that I find
myself sitting across a boardroom table from Dave Grimshaw, chairman of the
CMI's Critical Illness Committee, asking for an expert prognosis.
"Of course, the correct answer is, 'We don't know,'" he says. I don't want the
exact day or anything, I say, just a general idea of current life expectancy.

"Man or woman?" Man, let's say.

"Of what age?" I don't know - 42. Grimshaw sighs. I hold my breath.

"We don't like life expectancy," he says. I'm beginning to realise just how
difficult it is to get a pointed statement out of an actuary. Grimshaw grabs a
sharp pencil from a vase and talks me through a basic graph of British
mortality.

"If you have a group of people who are born in, let's say, 1935 - probably about
a million, I don't know what the number is - what happens is they die off, and
actually quite a lot of them die at age nought, in the first few months." His
pencil descends at a steep angle to the Y axis. "And then very, very few die
through their youth, until you get to age 17 or 18 and you start getting car
accidents and things, so you actually get a bit of a hump." He draws the hump
representing this little clutch of untimely expirations. "Then it slows down
again. And then gradually over time it accelerates until somewhere in about
2055, when the last one pops his clogs."

Life expectancy, he says, is an average based on this graph. In other words, we
can only find out the life expectancy of people born in 1935 when the last one
has died. "The calculation of life expectancy is something you can only do after
it ceases to be useful," he says. The alternative is projection and guesswork,
which is why actuaries don't like it.

Grimshaw prefers to deal in mortality rates: the percentage change in the number
of people of a specific age in a given sample who die in a given year. It is in
these more down-to-earth calculations that the numbers have surprised even the
actuaries. The CMI recently published figures that showed that pensioner
mortality fell by 30% in just eight years - roughly double what they were
predicting. To be more specific - and that's what actuaries like - the tables
showed that of 10,000 males aged 65 in 1994, 181 could be expected to die within
the year. In 2002, that figure was 129. For women the improvement was even more
marked, from 110 to just 74. There were further drops in mortality at age 75
(25%) and 85 (about 12%). When they issued a press release about it, CMI
chairman Brian Ridsdale said: "We're delighted to see that mortality is so much
lower." It's a stark irony, however, that what's good news for most of us spells
disaster for insurers.

Grimshaw points out that this all depends on the mix of your business. For
companies that primarily sell life insurance, it's great news. They get more
premium payments and pay out later. "It is undoubtedly creating problems for
insurance companies that have pensions liabilities," says Grimshaw. "I think
Brian was talking more from a social perspective." As for what the long-term
future holds, Grimshaw is as cautious as I have come to expect.

"Two people can look at the same sets of data and argue different things," he
says. "Among eminent demographers involved in the scientific side of
gerontology, there is one who argues that the person has already been born who
will live to 200." When I told my son this, he immediately said what I'd been
thinking all day: 'Is it me?'"

Not everybody is so optimistic. "There is another eminent person," says
Grimshaw, "who argues that there is a limit on human life which means that
people will never live beyond 120." What about that old woman in France, Jeanne

Calment, who lived until she was 122? Was she lying?

The CMI does not exist to fuel such rash speculation, but to provide insurers,
and to some extent the government, with information they can use to plan for the
future. "The fundamentals of pension planning," says Grimshaw, "both for
companies and the state, the fundamentals of life insurance, the fundamentals of
health provision, all depend on some sort of idea of how long people are going
to live."

So are the actuaries partly to blame for the current pensions crisis? In a
recent article, Michael Portillo blamed them for making "a poor job of
forecasting demand", citing the government's estimate of the number of
pensioners there will be in 2020, which has risen by a million since Labour took
office. According to the CMI, however, it is the data itself, rather than the
methodology, that makes such estimates unsafe. The future of mortality has
become as unpredictable as the stock market. "We are now at a point," says
Grimshaw, "if you think of it as bulls and bears in stock market terminology,
where the bulls are saying that these rates of improvement have been
consistently better than expected, so why shouldn't they continue in the future?
And then there are the bears who are saying this has happened, there are good
reasons why this happened, and those reasons won't repeat themselves." If
mortality remains a grim certainty, longevity has now become a game for betting
men.

Part of the reason for this is something called the Cohort Effect, whereby
groups of people of a certain age show sharp falls in mortality rates that
exceed both their predecessors and their successors. There is a particular
group, those born around the year 1931, who have outstripped everyone else in
terms of not dying. Some research shows that a reduction in smoking could
account for about a third of the drop. In any case, people born later have - so
far, anyway - not shown the same rates of improvement. The unforeseen robustness  of the 1931 cohort is illustrative of the problem facing the government: when the pension age was set at 65, a man who reached that age (and many never did) was expected to draw his pension for two to three years before shuffling obligingly off this mortal coil. A man who turned 65 in 2000 had a life expectancy of 86. In light of this, an increase in retirement age of a few years
seems a wholly inadequate response to the problem. It only seems fair that if
people are going to live so long and stay so bloody healthy, then they should be
prepared to work until they're older.

"That would be an obvious conclusion," admits Grimshaw. And yet the very notion
runs contrary to more than a century of thinking.
When Edward Bellamy wrote his utopian novel, Looking Backward, in 1887, he
predicted that technology and a universal collectivist welfare state would mean
that by the year 2000 most people would work for only a fraction of their lives,
perhaps as little as five or 10 years. Although it quickly become apparent that
this figure needed to be revised downwards, a steady increase in leisure time
was considered a corollary of social progress.

"I remember when I was at college," says Grimshaw, "listening to people like
[the Liberal MP] John Pardoe speak, and all the talk was of people having more
time, and maybe only working three or four days a week instead of five. Now we
are not only working harder, but facing the prospect of working longer. Until
very recently people have had an expectation that the retirement age would come down."

Does it ever become disturbing to work with mortality tables all day long? They
do, after all, represent the deaths, or the projected deaths, of real people.
"You don't think about it in terms of it being your grandmother or your mother,"
Grimshaw says.

I think of it more in terms of it being me. I can see my own age and gender
represented on his graph, languishing in a river of dark green, the colour of
the lowest rates of improvement you can have without actually going backwards.
Grimshaw says I shouldn't think about it like that. The improvements for my
cohort are above and beyond those that have gone before. My life expectancy is
still higher than the age group that has come previously, even if it isn't
increasing quite as quickly as the previous generation.

So go on then: how long have I got? Grimshaw really does not want to give me an answer, but eventually I drag it out of him. He sends me this email the next
day:

"We have estimated the expectation of life for male aged 42 is 48 years, 1
month, ie to live till just over age 90!" He wishes to make it clear that this
is just an estimate, based on a set of assumptions, and that longevity has a lot
to do with lifestyle. I'll admit that I'm vaguely disappointed not to be the
first 200-year-old man, but this estimate certainly gives me a lot more
mortality contemplation time. Also, the Government Actuary's Department only
gives me another 36.06 years, so I'm happy to stick with the CMI's figures.

Either way, the threat I present to the future of the state pension is
formidable. Maybe I should get a pension, or something.

Three score and ten? Old age through the ages
Methuselah According to Genesis, the grandfather of Noah lived to the age of 969 -no mean  feat when the only health care available was herbal tinctures and the occasional
divine intervention.

Unfortunately, this gerontologically pleasing era was over by Psalms 90 verse
10, which states we will be allotted three score years and ten.

Prehistoric man

Mr and Mrs Cro-Magnon rarely saw out the promised 70-year span, thanks to
mastodons and peat bogs. The average life expectancy for our knuckle-dragging
ancestors was in the mid-30s - the age at which modern single urban females
start weeping about how their lives are over.

The Romans

There is a reason why the preservative properties of stuffed dormice and
straight roads have not been lauded down the ages. The average Roman lived for
just 22 years - a lot less if you were a slave boy being buggered on a regular
basis by the Praetorian Guard.
Medieval man
You were doing well to be middle-aged in the middle ages. An average lifespan of 33 years is usually given, although experts increasingly insist that this is
unfairly skewed by the high infant mortality rate. If you could get past the
tricky first few years, your chances of making it into your 40s were reasonably
respectable. Unless, of course, you were struck by the Black Death - life
expectancy fell by about 20 years when the plague swept Europe.

The Victorians

By the middle of the 19th century, life expectancy had risen to 43 years,
despite the initially deleterious effects of the industrial revolution.

Fortunately, progress in medicine, engineering and understanding of disease
outpaced the evils of capitalism and the average lifespan increased throughout
the century, from 41 in 1871 to 46 in 1901.

The 20th century

The success story continued and by 1911 the average British citizen could expect to make his half century. Someone born 50 years later could look forward to 67 years. By the end of the century, the figure was 77, but there are now more than 6,000 centenarians in the UK alone. The oldest man currently living is Emilio
Mercado del Toro in Puerto Rico, who is almost 114. His female counterpart,
Elizabeth Bolden, is 115 years and 75 days old.

The future
Business professor and author Michael Zey said at the annual conference of the
World Future Society this year that "we are knocking on the door of immortality.
I think that by 2075 we will see it, and that is a conservative estimate."
Octogenarian Texas oil billionaire Miller Quarles founded the Curing Old Age
Disease Society, poured millions into researching life extension possibilities
and declared his intention to be the first person to live to 200. Unfortunately,
there has been nothing heard of him since 2002 and the COADS telephone number is now defunct, so we may have to knock a little longer.
Lucy Mangan
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005