EH.Net Mailing List Archive: EHB

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Larry Willmore writes: 
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| Russell Murphy provides an interesting and useful table, but it leaves me 
| curious regarding the gender distribution of the mortality distribution. 
| Would the top 10% in terms of longevity be composed entirely of females? 
 
I'm not entirely sure what leads to the dissatisfaction.  Longevity 
gains have been impressive almost no matter how you choose to look at 
them.   
 
| Also, alas, it tells us nothing regarding expected years of life from age 
| 60, where gains have been less impressive. 
 
It's possible that gains after age 60 "have been less impressive", but 
even if this were so (and see below for an alternative view), so many 
more people reach age 60 now that it's hard to see what the complaint 
would be. 
 
There *have* been gains after age 60, and apparently impressive ones. 
The following are expected years of life conditional on reaching age 
60 and age 80, for males and for females (Social Security 
Administration Actuarial Study 116; August 2002).  
 
       Birth      Age 60       Age 80 
       cohort     M    F       M    F 
       ------    --   --      --   -- 
         1900    16   22       7    9 
         1920    18   23       7    9 
         1940    20   24       8   10 
         1960    22   25       9   11 
         1980    23   27      10   12 
         2000    24   28      10   12 
       ------    --   --      --   -- 
     Increase    50%  27%     43%  33% 
 
There are plenty of caveats (e.g. rounded to the nearest year, 
estimation of future mortality experience, for population of US Social 
Security coverage area).  But the basic conclusion seems pretty clear. 
And given that mortality at younger ages is already quite low, future 
improvement in life expectancy (if any) will come at older ages. 
 
Although motherhood was dangerous early in the century, men still had 
relatively poorer prospects then; we have less to complain about 
today.  
 
 
Russ Murphy 
 
 
--  
Russell D. Murphy 
Department of Economics 
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 
Blacksburg, Virginia  24061 
(540) 231-4537 
 
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