A design for life: Using actuarial expertise to your own advantage
Whenever someone asks my wife what I do for a living, she grins and says, “He counts dead people.” Telling them I’m an actuary gets her a blank look; it’s not the kind of job you see on television or read about in novels.
Technically, she’s not wrong; as a life actuary I have pored over seemingly morbid information analysing patterns in life, death and everything in between. To change this characterisation, though, let’s use that same data to share a formula for living a longer, healthier and happier life. We actuaries have spent decades measuring death – it’s time we used that knowledge to enhance life.
A century of life expectancy gains
Willets et al.’s 2004 paper Longevity in the 21st Century charts how life expectancy at birth in England and Wales rose by around 30 years over the previous century, largely thanks to vaccines, antibiotics, science and sheer human stubbornness.
In the first half of the 20th century, improved sanitation, clean drinking water, antibiotics and vaccinations dramatically reduced deaths from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia. Infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy surged and society was fundamentally changed. In the second half of the century, improvements were driven by better management of chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
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