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Can Statistics Really Make You Live Longer

by Ian R Thorpe

Statisticians who predicted a win for Barack Obama in the US Presidential election are now casting themselves as prophets, soothsayers and Sybilline Oracles and making outrageous claims that statistics can affect how long we live. Is this justified? W-e-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l-l, they were rightish. All the science head managed to do in fact was call the winner of a two horse race correctly, a trick which anybody has a 50% chance of pulling off.

Few regular gamblers would bet to win in as two horse race (or a football, cricket, boxing match). The bookies would offer much more attractive odds on the winning margin, how many lengths a horse would win by, how many runs or wickets a cricket team would secure victory by, in which round a boxer would prevail.

On that basis most of the American statisticians were within their margin of error (which is set at plus or minus 4 %. Now as voter shifts tend to be small in American elections being "within the acceptable margin of error" means totally wrong.

The statistics boys are undeterred and are even claiming Obama's victory was down to the science of a pollster named Nate Silver. Nothing to do with the people who turned out to vote Democrat then. Oh no, it was Silver's statistics wot won it. In fact Silver, whose statistical conjuring tricks were accompanied by commentary so biased he clearly thought it was an affront to democracy that Obama was not being returned unopposed, predicted a landslide for the Democrat. Obama squeaked home by less than two per cent of the votes cast.

But as you all should know, there are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics and egged on by the election victory for the science of manipulating data the science heads are now claiming statistics can make you live longer.

Andrew Gache, longevity consultant at actuaries firm Club Vita, says that retiring at age 70 rather than 60 adds around 13 months to men’s life expectancy – and 12 months to women’s longevity – even after allowing for differences in individuals’ health, wealth and lifestyle.

That’s really great news for the rising numbers of people arriving at what used to be retirement age with grossly inadequate savings to fund a life of leisure or any kind of life. Poor old sods find they struggled scrimped and saved to build a retirement fund and now find it is worth five pounds a year while the silly buggers who drank, smoked, gambled and took out loans to go on foreign holidays are doing very nicely thank you on taxpayer funded pension credits. Still, abolition of the default retirement age of 65 last month means more people who want to work until they are 90, lose their minds or can no longer hold themselves erect will now be able to do so.

If the thought of an extra decade at work is just too much, then Another aspect of research shows that much shorter periods of work can also improve life expectancy. For example, men who retire at 65 rather than 60 live an average of 7.5 months longer, while women who delay retirement by the same period live an extra 6.5 months.

As always with statistics though the key to uncovering the fraud lies in what is being counted. Many occupations make working into advanced old age impractical – there aren’t many septuagenarian bricklayers – and individual illness will force those whose occupations are physically demanding or environmentally unhealthy will account for many early deaths.

Now a little balance has been brought into the equation some readers who are sceptical about pseudo sciences like statistics may prefer to ignore the science and side with former American President Ronald Reagan who observed: “They say hard work never killed anyone but I figure, why take the chance?”

There’s more than a grain of truth in that joke, as demonstrated by Office for National Statistics data which shows that manual workers tend to die much younger than administrative staff. Dave Grimshaw of actuaries Barnett Waddingham pointed out: “Lawyers, accountants and so on are a group in the data called ‘higher managerial and professional’. They would have life expectancy of nearly 19 years for males at age 65. At the other end of the scale, you would have occupations such as labourers and cleaners, where life expectancy at 65 is nearer 15 years.”

While medical advances, improved diet and cleaner working environments mean more people across Britain are living longer, the gap between lifespans for different groups of the population is growing, according to analysis by the Longevity Science Advisory Panel.

Here and now, the Club Vita research prompts the common sense question: why should working longer help us live longer? Bear in mind that, as mentioned above, the actuaries have not allowed for the fact that people forced to retire early by ill-health are likely to die sooner, as well as the mathematical fact that some who retire at 65 will die before reaching 70. To paraphrase the great Johnny Rotten, "Never trust a fahkin' scientist"

In the end the workshy and those who can think of more entertaining ways to spend their final years can argue that advice to work longer and live longer brings to mind a joke told by hard Drinking, chain smoking Irish comedian Dave Allen who died aged 68 but enjoyed every minute of it. A seeker asked a guru for the secret of eternal life and was advised to give up smoking, drinking, chocolate and sex.

“But will that really make me live forever?” asked the questor after truth. “No,” replied the guru, “but every day will feel that way.”

Update: How Not To Run An Election