NEW vs England and Wales

18. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Demographics

The land of the four score and ten and over looks a bit different from the rest of the country

My grandfather used to say that he had had his three score and ten (that’s 70 for those brought up in a decimal age) and was now quite content to die when the time came. He said this with increasing frequency and some bewilderment before his final death at the age of four score and ten in 1991. This bewilderment was understandable: there were 222,820 over 90 year olds in 1991, already over 40% up on the 1981 total. However the changes since his death have been even more dramatic, with 440,290 over 90 year olds in 2011.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has recently published a statistical bulletin entitled Estimates of the Very Old (including Centenarians), 2002-2011, England and Wales, which summarises how the proportions living to four score and ten and beyond have changed over the 30 years since 1981. It shows us a population living within a population: Nonagenarian (ie the over 90s) England and Wales (NEW) within the full population of England and Wales.

Imagine for a moment NEW viewed as a different country, where people are “born” as they reach 90 and we ignore (as the ONS have done in compiling these statistics) immigration and emigration.

The first thing to notice about NEW is that the age structure looks very different to that of England and Wales. We can see this by comparing the “population pyramids”, as they are known, below, with the number of people at each age shown on a graph, males to the left in blue and females to the right in red:

The numbers fall away much faster of course at the older ages, although the shape still shows the biggest falls between ages 91 and 92 reflecting the impact on birth rates at ages (in 2011) from 92 to 97 of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. There are far more women than men in NEW, although the overall ratio has reduced from 4:1 in 1981 to around 2.7:1 in 2011. By comparison, the England and Wales population is much more balanced (there are 4% more women than men). The NEW population is somewhere between the sizes of Malta’s and Cape Verde’s full population.

Your chances of living to 100 in NEW as a newly arrived 90 year old are about the same as those of a new born in England and Wales qualifying for entry into NEW one day.

The world to which NEW belongs looks very different from that which England and Wales or the UK are used to. The largest country is not China or India, but the United States. Japan, whose overall population is about a tenth that of India has an over 90 population over twice that of India’s.

Finally, the population of NEW is growing far more quickly than that of England and Wales, or indeed the UK, with a 26% increase between 2002 and 2011, almost four times the UK rate over the same period.

My grandfather only spent a few months in NEW but, by 2011, 570 people had spent over 15 years in this land. It is going to become a much more familiar place to many of us.

Actuaries and Science Fiction

18. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Prediction, Science Fiction

Brian Aldiss told me a story the other week (at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group, where he is an honorary president) about Margaret Thatcher and her attitude towards science fiction. Kingsley Amis had been invited to a party at Downing Street and had decided to take along an inscribed copy of his latest book Russian Hide and Seek. Mrs Thatcher, a little suspicious about what she was being handed, had apparently asked what it was about.

Amis had explained that it was set in the future when the UK had been under Russian occupation for 50 years.

“Can’t you do any better than that?” the Prime Minister is reported to have said. “Get yourself another crystal ball.”

Aldiss recounted this story as he felt it illustrated how Mrs Thatcher totally misunderstood what science fiction was about. It was not about prediction of the future, but for people who “liked the disorientation” (the essence of science fiction in Aldiss’s view) of portraying an unfamiliar landscape and trying to work out what would hold true under different circumstances.

It seems to me that this is also what being an actuary is about. Actuaries are not about prediction either, but they are prepared to embrace the disorientation of asking what ifs and exploring maybes, and, by so doing, try to quantify what different currently unfamiliar landscapes might look like.

Science fiction has many forms but two main camps politically: the camp which believes a more enlightened form of society is possible (although what that means might vary considerably between different campers); and the camp which doesn’t but instead believes that all we can hope to do is survive a remorseless universe governed by nothing more than the laws of physics and evolutionary biology.

I think actuaries may have leaned more towards the second of these world views, particularly in fulfilling their statutory roles in recent years. We have worked within the remorseless universe of regulators and assumed that increasingly complex systems will make us safer in a Darwinian financial world. However the group think this has inevitably promoted has made us all less safe. As a result, we have heard many voices in the discussions about the financial crisis, including many what ifs and maybes, but few of these voices have been actuaries’. To quote Bob Godfrey (admittedly he was talking about animation at the time), the professionals are in a rut and the amateurs aren’t good enough.

Actuaries need to put themselves about as much as the amateurs do. Sometimes that will be uncomfortable. Sometimes we may look a little foolish for a while. But in my view it is the only way we are going to contribute meaningfully to the construction of a better society. And we might even produce some decent science fiction in the process.

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