Trends in Longevity

This paper considers the problem of portfolio selection and adjustment for target benefit plans (TBP) with longevity trends and partial information. The longevity trends are modeled by a time-varying force function. The financial market consists of risk-free assets and stocks, in which the return rate of stocks is a stochastic process and cannot be completely observed. This paper adopts the mean-variance utility model as an optimization criterion. The aim is to maximize the terminal value of the pension fund and the excess pension benefit after the participant’s retirement. The optimization equations are developed in game theory to obtain explicit solutions for the equilibrium strategies. Finally, the influence of the longevity trend on the internal structure of the pension system and the sensitivity of the equilibrium strategies to the related parameters are explored by numerical analysis. The conclusion shows that this model’s results can provide stable and adequate retirement benefits for participants.

Chapter 4 - Trends in Longevity and Prospects for the Future

Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity is a collection of essays by Nobel laureate Robert W. Fogel on the theory and measurement of ageing and health-related variables. Dr Fogel analyzes historic data on height, health, nutrition and life expectation to provide a clearer understanding of the past, illustrate the costs and benefits of using such measures and note the difficulties of drawing conclusions from data intended for different purposes. Dr Fogel explains how the basic findings of the anthropometric approach to historical analysis have helped reinterpret the nature of economic growth. Rising life expectancies and lower disease rates in countries experiencing economic growth highlight the importance of improving nutrition and agricultural productivity.

Dora L. Costa of University of California, Los Angeles reviews, “Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity” by Robert W. Fogel. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the theory and measurement of aging- and health-related variables and considers how the anthropometric approach to historical analysis has helped reinterpret the nature of economic growth. Discusses secular changes in American and British stature and nutrition; second thoughts on the European escape from hunger—famines, chronic malnutrition, and mortality rates; trends in physiological capital—implications for equity in health care; changes in disparities and chronic diseases through the course of the twentieth century; and some common problems in analysis and measurement. Fogel is Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.”

Over the past century, there have been tremendous increases in longevity in the United States and most other developed countries. If these trends continue, the costs of paying for public programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will escalate at a startling rate with the aging of the "baby boomer" generation. A meeting titled "Living Longer and Paying the Price?" was organized to consider whether current trends in longevity will continue at the current pace, accelerate, or decelerate as a result of public health problems such as obesity and infectious diseases. Further, speakers presented their views on covering the costs of public and private programs for future generations of older adults.

We develop a new way to measure national subjective well-being across the very long run where traditional survey data on well-being is not available. Our method is based on quantitative analysis of digitized text from millions of books published over the past 200 years, long before the widespread availability of consistent survey data. The method uses psychological valence norms for thousands of words in different languages to compute the relative proportion of positive and negative language for four different nations (the USA, UK, Germany and Italy). We validate our measure against existing survey data from the 1970s onwards (when such data became available) showing that our measure is highly correlated with surveyed life satisfaction. We also validate our measure against historical trends in longevity and GDP (showing a positive relationship) and conflict (showing a negative relationship). Our measure allows a first look at changes in subjective well-being over the past two centuries, for instance highlighting the dramatic fall in well-being during the two World Wars and rise in relation to longevity.

Correction to "Secular trends in longevity among people with down syndrome in Japan, 1995-2016".

ObjectiveWe describe trends in life expectancy at birth (LE) and between-country LE disparities since 1965, in Latin America and the Caribbean.Methods & FindingsLE trends since 1965 are described for three geographical sub-regions: the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. LE disparities are explored using a suite of absolute and relative disparity metrics, with measurement consensus providing confidence to observed differences. LE has increased throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Compared to the Caribbean, LE has increased by an additional 6.6 years in Central America and 4.1 years in South America. Since 1965, average reductions in between-country LE disparities were 14% (absolute disparity) and 23% (relative disparity) in the Caribbean, 55% and 51% in Central America, 55% and 52% in South America.ConclusionsLE in Latin America and the Caribbean is exceeding ‘minimum standard’ international targets, and is improving relative to the world region with the highest human longevity. The Caribbean, which had the highest LE and the lowest between-country LE disparities in Latin America and the Caribbean in 1965-70, had the lowest LE and the highest LE disparities by 2005-10. Caribbean Governments have championed a collaborative solution to the growing burden of non-communicable disease, with 15 territories signing on to the Declaration of Port of Spain, signalling regional commitment to a coordinated public-health response. The persistent LE inequity between Caribbean countries suggests that public health interventions should be tailored to individual countries to be most effective. Between- and within-country disparity monitoring for a range of health metrics should be a priority, first to guide country-level policy initiatives, then to contribute to the assessment of policy success.

The trend of longevity and some economic repercussions.

For a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemográfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups, and (2) the inequality in age-at-death distributions within and across those groups for the period between 1960 and 2015 in Spain. Our findings suggest that life expectancy has been increasing for all education groups but particularly among the highly educated. We observe diverging trends in life expectancy, with the differences between the low- and highly educated becoming increasingly large, particularly among men. Concomitantly with increasing disparities across groups, length-of-life inequality has decreased for the population as a whole and for most education groups, and the contribution of the between-group component of inequality to overall inequality has been extremely small. Even if between-group inequality has increased over time, its contribution has been too small to have sizable effects on overall inequality. In addition, our results suggest that education expansion and declining within-group variability might have been the main drivers of overall lifespan inequality reductions. Nevertheless, the diverging trends in longevity and lifespan inequality across education groups represent an important phenomenon whose underlying causes and potential implications should be investigated in detail.

In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems and higher productivity, making subjective wellbeing a focal issue among researchers and governments. However, it is difficult to estimate how happy people were during previous centuries. Here we show that a method based on the quantitative analysis of natural language published over the past 200 years captures reliable patterns in historical subjective wellbeing. Using sentiment analysis on the basis of psychological valence norms, we compute a national valence index for the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Italy, indicating relative happiness in response to national and international wars and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and gross domestic product. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s and demonstrate robustness using words with stable historical meanings, diverse corpora (newspapers, magazines and books) and additional word norms. By providing a window on quantitative historical psychology, this approach could inform policy and economic history.

Understanding long-range trends in longevity and disability is useful for projecting the likely impact of the baby-boom generation on long-term care utilization and spending. We examine changes in active life expectancy in the United States from 1982 to 2011 for white and black adults ages sixty-five and older. For whites, longevity increased, disability was postponed to older ages, the locus of care shifted from nursing facilities to community settings, and the proportion of life at older ages spent without disability increased. In contrast, for blacks, longevity increases were accompanied by smaller postponements in disability, and the percentage of remaining life spent active remained stable and well below that of whites. Older black women were especially disadvantaged in 2011 in terms of the proportion of years expected to be lived without disability. Public health measures directed at older black adults-particularly women-are needed to offset impending pressures on the long-term care delivery system as the result of population aging.

An ongoing body of research documents that women empowerment is associated with improved outcomes for children. However, little is known about the long-run effects on health outcomes. This paper adds to this literature and studies the association between maternal exposure to suffrage reforms and children's old-age longevity. We utilize changes in suffrage laws across US states and over time as a source of incentivizing maternal investment in children's health and education. Using the universe of death records in the US over the years 1979-2020 and implementing a difference-in-difference econometric framework, we find that cohorts exposed to suffrage throughout their childhood live 0.6years longer than unexposed cohorts. Furthermore, we show that these effects are not driven by preexisting trends in longevity, endogenous migration, selective fertility, and changes in the demographic composition of the sample. Additional analysis reveals that improvements in education and income are candidate mechanisms. Moreover, we find substantial improvements in early-adulthood socioeconomic standing, height, and height-for-age outcomes due to childhood exposure to suffrage movements. A series of state-level analyses suggest reductions in infant and child mortality following suffrage law change. We also find evidence that counties in states that passed the law experienced new openings of County Health Departments and increases in physicians per capita.

Many pensions' markets are experiencing a transition from Defined Benefit (DB) to Defined Contribution (DC) schemes, with most of the former being closed, frozen or wound up. Against this backdrop this paper aims to calculate the DB market's future growth, but approaching the problem from the liabilities' side. We develop a general model whereby we can project DB liabilities based on the expected future trends in longevity, membership dynamics and salary growth. We then can deduce the expected future evolution of DB liabilities, which if tied to assets, may be seen as an approach to predict the pension asset management market in the future. We apply this model to the UK pensions market. The main result is that even if all UK DB schemes are considered closed, DB liabilities still show a growing trend until the year 2017, reaching a maximum of 39% above their current level and only returning to their current level around 2035.

The rise in human longevity is one of humanity's crowning achievements. Although advances in public health beginning in the 19th century initiated the rise in life expectancy, recent gains have been achieved by reducing death rates at middle and older ages. A debate about the future course of life expectancy has been ongoing for the last quarter century. Some suggest that historical trends in longevity will continue and radical life extension is either visible on the near horizon or it has already arrived; whereas others suggest there are biologically based limits to duration of life, and those limits are being approached now. In "inconvenient truths about human longevity" we lay out the line of reasoning and evidence for why there are limits to human longevity; why predictions of radical life extension are unlikely to be forthcoming; why health extension should supplant life extension as the primary goal of medicine and public health; and why promoting advances in aging biology may allow humanity to break through biological barriers that influence both life span and health span, allowing for a welcome extension of the period of healthy life, a compression of morbidity, but only a marginal further increase in life expectancy.