Fun With Mortality Tables

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/fun-with-mortality-tables/

August 13, 2010, 5:50 pm

Hoo boy, if Social Security is the big thing in the next few months — which is starting to look possible — it’s going to be like old times again, shooting down all the usual fallacies one more time.

So: one thing you’re going to hear is something along the lines of, “In 1950 life expectancy was only 68 years, so hardly anyone was collecting Social Security; now it’s 78 years — the problem is obvious”.

Does anyone know what’s wrong with this? You over there in the corner?

That’s right: a life expectancy of 68 years doesn’t mean that a lot of people toddle along then suddenly keel over over after threescore and eight birthdays. Mostly it meant much higher child mortality than we have now, which has no relevance one way or the other to Social Security.

Much more to the point is the number of years people could expect to live after reaching 65: 14 years in 1950, 18.5 years now. Not so impressive a change, is it? And the retirement age is already 66 for my cohort, and scheduled to rise to 67 on current law.

Oh, and by the way, rising life expectancy was built into Social Security planning from the beginning. The big surprise has, if anything, been stagnating life expectancy among less affluent Americans.

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Paul Krugman has a series of posts about facts about Social Security.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/


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