SPA and HLE

26. March 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: Demographics, Health, Pensions, Regulation

One of the pensions announcements in the Budget last week which got less coverage amongst the talk about freedom and the death of the annuity was the one about the minimum age at which pension benefits will be able to be taken in the future. In this respect the Government appears to feel that less freedom is preferable.

Historically the minimum age was 50 except for a list of exempted professions kept by HMRC (or the Inland Revenue as they then were) which included professional footballers. However in 2010 it was increased to 55. From 2028 it is proposed that it is going to be increased again, to 57, thereafter linked to increases in the State Pension Age (SPA).

PwC have projected that, assuming the policy of linking SPA to life expectancy continues into the future, we can expect a SPA of 77 by 2089 and 84 by 2134. If this all sounds a little futuristic, it does highlight a concern about the Government proposal of using SPA minus 10 (or even SPA minus 5 which is also being consulted upon) as a national minimum pension age.

Male HLEFemale HLE

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) have produced an interesting split of both life expectancy at birth (LE) and healthy life expectancy at birth (HLE) by deciles of deprivation. Graphing these with the steadily increasing SPAs shown in black and the minimum pension ages in red we can see that the bottom male and female 10% by deprivation already have a healthy life expectancy below the current minimum pension age, with a further 10% being caught by the increase to 57.

Admittedly we might hope for an increase in both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy at all levels by 2028, but the differentials between the poorest and the richest in this respect have been widening for some time. Certainly if the SPA minus 5 idea is adopted, giving a minimum pension age of 62 by 2028, it is difficult to see the bottom deciles reaching that age in good health. And what about a minimum pension age of 67 by 2089 (72 if SPA minus 5)? Do we think that we have policies in place to increase the healthy life expectancy of the bottom decile by the 15 years (or 20 years if SPA minus 5) that would be required to allow them to retire in good health, even assuming they felt able to do so financially?

As I have mentioned before, I think the Government needs to consider ill health early retirement to a greater extent in its policies towards state pension benefits, but this may be particularly urgent with respect to minimum retirement ages. The main problem as I see it would be the assessment of ill health, bearing in mind the current ATOS fiasco.

One alternative approach might be to try and maintain the minimum pension age as a proportion of SPA rather than a fixed number of years earlier. So, for instance, the current proportion (55/65 or 85%) would give a minimum pension age when SPA reached 77 of around 65.5 rather than the 67 proposed.

Leaving the proposals as they stand, however, is likely to lead to an increasingly ill elderly workforce engaged in the lowest paying and most physically demanding occupations. Not free, and without choices. That doesn’t sound like an election winner to me.

Carry on Clio

04. January 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Demographics, Economics, Health, Prediction

It’s a relatively new science, and one which binds together many different academic disciplines: mathematical modelling, economics, sociology and history. In economic terms, it is to what economists in financial institutions spend most of their time focusing on – the short to medium term – as climate science is to weather forecasting. Cliodynamics (from Clio, the Ancient Greek muse or goddess of history (or, sometimes, lyre playing) and dynamics, the study of processes of change with time) looks at the functioning and dynamics of historical societies, ie societies for which the historical data exists to allow analysis. And that includes our own.

Peter Turchin, professor of ecology and mathematics at the University of Connecticut and Editor-in-Chief of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, wrote a book with Sergey Nefedev in 2009 called Secular Cycles. In it they took the ratio of the net wealth of the median US household to the largest fortune in the US (the Phillips Curve) to get a rough estimate of wealth inequality in the US from 1800 to the present. The graph of this analysis shows that the level of inequality in the US measured in this way peaked in World War 1 before falling steadily until 1980 when Reagan became US President, after which it has been rising equally steadily. By 2000,inequality was at levels last seen in the mid 50s, and it has continued to increase markedly since then.

The other side of Turchin’s and Nefedev’s analysis combines four measures of wellbeing: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population) and social optimism (average age of first marriage). This seems to me to be a slightly flaky way of measuring this, particularly if using this measure to draw conclusions about recent history: the link between average heights in the US and other health indicators are not fully understood, and there are a lot of possible explanations for later marriages (eg greater economic opportunities for women) which would not support it as a measure of reduced optimism. However, it does give a curve which looks remarkably like a mirror image of the Phillips Curve.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) are currently developing their own measure of national well-being for the UK, which has dropped both height and late marriage as indicators, but unfortunately has expanded to cover 40 indicators organised into 10 areas. The interactive graphic is embedded below.

Graphic by Office for National Statistics (ONS)

I don’t think many would argue with many of these constituents except that any model should only be as complicated as it needs to be. The weightings will be very important.

Putting all of this together, Turchin argues that societies can only tolerate a certain level of inequality before they start finding more cooperative ways of governing and cites examples from the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC) onwards. He believes the current patterns in the US point towards such a turning point around 2020, with extreme social upheaval a strong possibility.

I am unconvinced that time is that short based solely on societal inequality: in my view further aggravating factors will be required, which resource depletion in several key areas may provide later in the century. But Turchin’s analysis of 20th century change in the US is certainly coherent, with many connections I had not made before. What is clear is that social change can happen very quickly at times and an economic-political system that cannot adapt equally quickly is likely to end up in trouble.

And in the UK? Inequality is certainly increasing, by pretty much any measure. And, as Richard Murphy points out, our tax system appears to encourage this more than is often realised. Cliodynamics seems to me to be an important area for further research in the UK.

And a perfect one for actuaries to get involved in.

 

State Pension Age and its discontents

10. December 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Demographics, Economics, Health, Pensions, Prediction, Regulation

When I started writing this blog in April, one of its main purposes was to highlight how poor we are at forecasting things, and suggest that our decision-making would improve if we acknowledged this fact. The best example I could find at the time to illustrate this point were the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecasts over the previous 3 years.

Eight months on it therefore feels like we have come full circle with the publication of the December 2013 OBR forecasts in conjunction with the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement. Little appears to have changed in the interim, the coloured lines on the chart below of their various forecasts now joined by the latest one all display similar shapes steadily moving to the right, advising extreme caution in framing any decision based on what the current crop of forecasts suggest.

OBR update

However, the worse the forecasts are revealed to be, the keener it seems politicians of all the three main parties are to base policy upon them. The Autumn Statement ran to 7,000 words, of which 18 were references to the OBR, with details of their forecasts taking up at least a quarter of the speech. In every area of economic policy, from economic growth to employment to government debt, it seemed that the starting point was what the OBR predicted on the subject. The Shadow Chancellor appears equally convinced that the OBR lends credibility to forecasting, pleading for Labour’s own tax and spending plans to be assessed by them in the run up to the next election.

I am a little mystified by all of this. The updated graph of the OBR’s performance since 2010 does not look any better than it did in April, the lines always go up in the future and so far they have always been wrong. If they turn out to be right (or, more likely, a bit less wrong) this time, then that does not seem to me to tell us anything much about their predictive skill. It takes great skill, as Les Dawson showed, to unerringly hit the wrong notes every time. It just takes average luck to hit them occasionally.

For another bit of crystal ball gazing in his Statement, the Chancellor abandoned the OBR to talk about state pension ages. These were going to go up to 68 by 2046. Now they are going to go up to 68 by the mid 2030s and then to 69 by the late 2040s. There will still be people alive now who were born when the state retirement age (for the “Old Age Pension” as it was then called) was 70. It looks like we are heading back in that direction again.

The State Pension Age (SPA) was introduced in 1908 as 70 years for men and women, when life expectancy at birth was below 55 for both. In 1925 it was reduced to 65, at which time life expectancy at birth had increased to 60.4 for women and 56.5 for men. In 1940, a SPA below life expectancy at birth was introduced for the first time, with women allowed to retire from age 60 despite a life expectancy of 63.5. Men, with a life expectancy of 58.2 years were still expected to continue working until they were 65. Male life expectancy at birth did not exceed SPA until 1948 (source: Human Mortality Database).

In 1995 the transition arrangements to put the SPA for women back up to 65 began, at which stage male life expectancy was 73.9 and female 79.2 years. In 2007 we all started the transition to a new SPA of 68. In 2011 this was speeded up and last week the destination was extended to 69.

SPAs

Where might it go next? If the OBR had a SPA modeller anything like their GDP modeller it would probably say up, in about another 2 years (just look again at the forecasts in the first graph to see what I mean). Ministers have hit the airwaves to say that the increasing SPA is a good news story, reflecting our increasingly long lives. And the life expectancies bear this out, with the 2011 figures showing life expectancy at birth for males at 78.8 and for females at 82.7, with all pension schemes and insurers building in further big increases to those life expectancies into their assumptions over the decades ahead.

And yet. The ONS statistical bulletin in September on healthy life expectancy at birth tells a different story which is not good news at all. Healthy life expectancies for men and women (ie the maximum age at which respondents would be expected to regard themselves as in good or very good health) at birth are only 63.2 and 64.2 years respectively. If people are going to have to drag themselves to work for 5 or 6 years on average in poor health before reaching SPA under current plans, how much further do we really expect SPA to increase?

Some have questioned the one size fits all nature of SPA, suggesting regional differences be introduced. If that ever happened, would we expect to see the mobile better off becoming SPA tourists, pushing up house prices in currently unfashionable corners of the country just as they have with their second homes in Devon and Cornwall? Perhaps. I certainly find it hard to imagine any state pension system which could keep up with the constantly mutating socioeconomics of the UK’s regions.

Perhaps a better approach would be a SPA calculated by HMRC with your tax code. Or some form of ill health early retirement option might be introduced to the state pension. What seems likely to me is that the pressures on the Government to mitigate the impact of a steadily increasing SPA will become one of the key intergenerational battlegrounds in the years ahead. In the meantime, those lines on the chart are going to get harder and harder for some.

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