Re: Mortality improvements steady over 55 years

From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 27 2000 - 13:08:48 MST


Hal Finney wrote:
>One thing they could do with this technique (it's not clear if they are
>doing this) is to extrapolate the mortality rates forward and answer
>the question, what is the expected lifetime of a person who is X years
>old today? They would use the mortality for X-year-olds in 2000, for
>(X+10)-year-olds in 2010, for (X+20)-year-olds in 2020, and so on.
>This would be a more meaningful number in terms of an actual prediction
>for how long people can expect to live, again assuming steady growth.

They in fact did this, in table 6 of the paper. I look up the year
2000, and my age of 40, and I find that I have a remaining life
expectancy of 39.1 years. Of course this assumes I might be female,
which I'm not, so presumably I have to knock 5-15 years off of this
forecast.

Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



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