Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
He was part of a panel this weekend at the MIT Museum. It was interesting to hear how widespread this problem of poor record keeping is for births and deaths. Up until quite recently (like the 1960’s for the US), many places were, and some still are, terrible about it. That didn’t even include things like China’s former one child policy.
It’s not just a curiosity that some people don’t actually know how old they really are. It has real effects. When you’re trying to make health care or retirement benefit decisions for a whole country, having bad population data is a serious concern. Life insurance actuaries probably treat out their hair over this sort of issue, too
I have a physicist cousin who has a knighthood and an Ig Nobel prize.
He’s far more proud of the latter.
I would think that I reached the peak of my career if I won an Ig Nobel prize.
I mean I’m sure he hopes for a real Nobel one day, but I’m sure he took this as a wonderful consolation prize.
I think he found the knighthood thing embarrassing mostly. He said he started to explain why he got it to the queen and she couldn’t have been more disinterested.
I used to work for a big north American restaurant chain. Any employer provided employment development was schlocky pop self help. They were always full of studies like longevity studies proving their efficacy. Self help is closer to evangelical big church religion than help. Such a scam. Those classes were so painful.
Anyways glad to see something so commonly held put up to scrutiny.
The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
yeah lol
short version: almost all “very old humans” are just dead and never register their deaths
How inconsiderate to just die and not call someone about it…
It’s more common that dependents who are receiving the benefits don’t register the death to keep the payments flowing. I personally think a lot of places could be much more generous with poverty assistance instead of forcing those folks to keep the pensions flowing to garner aide.
Wow, I never would have considered that this stuff would distort the stats so massively. But it actually makes a lot of sense and he seems to have some very damning data points. Very interesting stuff.
