2-02: How Long Will You Live?
Death, as they say, comes for us all. Nobody knows when he’s going to show up, scythe in hand. even the obscenely rich techbros obsessed with living forever are going to meet him someday.
Death is a fact. When it happens is a surprise. And despite all the math in the world, there’s no way to tell when you, specifically, will meet it.
In financial planning, how long you might live is something we have to make assumptions about to make sure you have enough money to live on, however long that might be. These assumptions, just like the ones we make about how your investments might act and how much things will cost in the future, are based on knowledge about the past and educated guesses about the future, and entirely outside of your control.
So why are we talking about it today?
Let me tell you why: it’s too easy to misunderstand or misinterpret the statistics, and the last thing I want you to do is assume you’re going to die at age 84, plan your finances accordingly, and then get a nasty shock when you wake up on the morning of your 85th birthday.
It’s also easy to misapply the statistics and assume everyone’s lives are better and longer than they used to be and to sit back, happy and content, while the people around you are dying earlier than they would if governments in Canada hadn’t taken a hacksaw to the social safety net in the 80s and kept sawing away at it ever since.
What Does Life Expectancy Mean?
You’ve probably heard that the average life expectancy for men in Canada is just over 79 years, while women, on average, have a life expectancy of just under 84 years (or you may have heard slightly different numbers because they change over the years).
What’s important to know about these numbers is that they’re from birth, they include everyone, and they assume that people will die at the same rate in the future as they have in the past.
So what these “average life expectancy” numbers are really saying in the plainest language possible is that a brand new baby girl born today will, on average, live to almost age 84, assuming people die at the same rate they have in the past. What they’re not saying is anything about how long she might live if she’s already 36, or 59, or 84.
Better life expectancy numbers start from how old you already are. Even better life expectancy numbers start from how old you already are and group you with people similar to you in terms of your gender, whether you’ve smoked before, and your health compared to the rest of the population.
The very best life expectancy numbers include your ethnic background and history of racial oppression or cultural genocide, medical history, occupation, and how much money you have compared to everyone else. For example, an Inuk baby of any gender born today has an average life expectancy of just under 73 years. An Indigenous baby born on-reserve has an average life expectancy of 74 years. A baby boy born in poverty can expect a life that’s just under five years shorter than one born into wealth.
But even with the very best math, life expectancy can only take us so far. It can tell us, for example, that in a group of 100,000 84 year old women, almost 95,000 of them will be alive at age 85. It can tell us that wealthy white women are more likely to be in the group of 94,348 who live, and that Indigenous and racialized women, and the ones living in poverty or with a disability are more likely to be in the group of 5,362 who won’t…but it can’t tell us which specific women.
Life Expectancy Isn’t Destiny…but it is policy
When Canada first started tracking who dies, from what, and at what age in the 1920s. Life expectancy at birth for the entire population was just over 57 years, compared to just over 81 years now. Thanks to public health interventions like vaccines, milk pasteurization, and water cleanliness, babies survive their first year way more often than they used to.
As a society, we’ve increased people’s chances of avoiding or surviving heart disease and cancer. We’ve decreased the amount of people who die in car accidents by making seatbelts mandatory.
For a long stretch of time after world war two, successive governments increased access to healthcare, affordable housing, decent, safe work, and education. People, on average, lived longer, healthier, and all-round better lives.
Will that be true for the people living today?
If you have money, maybe, although you can’t buy your way out of a global climate crisis, not completely anyway. Will it be true if you don’t have clean drinking water in your community? If you’re trans? If you have to work more hours for less pay and can’t afford a decent place to stay?
Who lives, and for how long, is a mystery when we try to zoom in on individuals. But at a community level, who lives and for how long is decided by government policy and social will. There’s no mystery about it.
Resources
Life expectancy (in years) at birth
Life expectancy at birth of Indigenous populations in Canada