way of looking at this,’ Sully reflected afterwards, ‘might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.’
That wonderfully modest, laconic statement sums up the value of cumulative expertise. I’m not claiming that every 58-year-old is a hero-in-the-making – and I’ve seen good ideas from young people being ignored because they are not considered mature enough – but I do feel that we live in a world more interested in ‘digital skills’ than judgement, which only comes with experience. Personally, I don’t want to be flown by a novice pilot any more than I want to be operated on by a surgeon still in training. I want the guy who’s done the same procedure a thousand times.
Some economists believe that ageing workforces are behind the decline in Western productivity. But what if part of the problem is that baby boomers are retiring in droves, taking with them valuable experience and institutional memory?
‘I am of the old school,’ said English barrister Jerry Hayes, 64, describing how he intervened to save an innocent young man from being jailed for rape.21 Hayes was supposed to be prosecuting the man, but his 40 years of experience at the English Bar made ‘alarm bells ring’ when he took over the case at the eleventh hour and asked a police officer whether there were any mobile-phone messages from the man’s accuser. The officer insisted he hadn’t bothered to show the messages to the defence as there was nothing in them, but Hayes stood his ground and demanded the evidence. 40,000 messages were then handed over, which showed that the so-called ‘victim’ had been pestering the man continually for sex. The case collapsed and a terrible miscarriage of justice was avoided – but only because of the intuition, experience and sheer bloody-mindedness of a man with a white beard who believed that getting justice was more important than nailing up another successful prosecution.
How Much Extra Time Might You Get?
To get an idea of your life expectancy, type a few facts about yourself into an online pension calculator. Let’s say you tell it you are a healthy white Englishman, born in 1958. The calculator will give you a life expectancy of 90.
That may come as a shock. Most of us massively underestimate how long we have to live. We tend to think ‘when did Granny die?’ rather than realising that we have gained Extra Time. People in their fifties and sixties underestimate their chances of survival to age 75 by 20 per cent according to the UK Institute for Fiscal Studies. Widows and widowers are especially pessimistic.
None of us likes to think about death. But if we fear it’s around the corner when it isn’t, there’s a risk we may start to feel ‘old’ too soon. We won’t save enough, plan our career far enough ahead, or, frankly, feel positive enough about our future.
Of course, averages don’t tell us much about our own individual prospects. Our longevity can be boosted by all sorts of things: our income, fitness, even whether we are married or not (married people live longer). But the single most powerful predictor of how long each of us will live turns out to be our level of education. The more time you spent in education in early life, the more Extra Time you are likely to have at the end. And the better your chances of spending that Extra Time in good health.
The figures are surprising. In 2008, white American men with one or more degrees were expected to live up to 14 years longer than black American men who didn’t finish high school.22 In OECD countries, the gap between men with those education levels is around 7 years.23
Education is a stronger predictor of lifespan than wealth. Well-educated Cuba, though dirt poor, has higher life expectancies than America. Oil-rich but poorly educated Equatorial Guinea, on the other hand, has low average life expectancies. So stark are these differences, one expert has suggested that governments should invest more in schools than in hospitals.24
The Geography of Life Chances
I’m standing outside the Abbey Road Studios in London’s St John’s Wood. This is where The Beatles recorded some of their greatest hits and the traffic has stopped as four French tourists attempt to re-create the Fab Four’s famous Abbey Road album cover, by walking across the black-and-white zebra crossing. I cycle past here regularly, and I know that every tourist imagines they were the first to have the idea. A taxi driver gives me a weary look.
From Abbey Road, a prosperous area in the Borough of Westminster with red-brick mansion blocks and detached houses, I’m cycling south to meet a friend for coffee. I’m going to do a route I take often, along backstreets. What I didn’t know, until recently, was that this route spans 10 years of life expectancy.25
At Abbey Road, female life expectancy at birth is around 87 years and 85 for men. I cycle south, towards Lord’s cricket ground, into Church Street ward. Here, female life expectancy has dropped to 81 years and it’s 80 for men. I make a right turn towards St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where I was born, and cut along the canal to Westbourne Park tube station, where I’m meeting my friend. By now, female life expectancy has dropped to 77 years and to 75 for men. In a 15-minute trip, life expectancy has changed by a decade. A baby girl who is born and who lives her life in Abbey Road can expect to live, on average, 10 years longer than one born just 1.5 miles away.
You can find similar gaps in many Western regions. Raj Chetty of Stanford University has found a 15-year gap in lifespan between the poorest and richest Americans. But he has also found that absolute income seems to matter less than where you live. The poorest live five years longer in New York and Los Angeles than they do in Tulsa and Detroit. In those areas, Chetty’s work suggests that smoking, drinking, stress and obesity have more impact on lifespan than income inequality or unemployment, although of course the two are linked.
Are You Heading for a Nursing Home, or the Beach?
‘In the end,’ as Abraham Lincoln said, ‘it is not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.’ In surveys, people say repeatedly that they don’t want to live to 100 if that means spending their last years in some ghostly half-life of senescence.
In the twentieth century, when most of us died from infectious diseases, increases in life expectancy generally implied an improvement in health for everybody. In the twenty-first century, that link has broken. Longevity is bringing some people more years of good health, but others more years of frailty.
There are two reasons for this. First, medical advances mean that things which used to kill us, like heart attacks and stroke, are less often fatal. We can keep people alive, stumbling gratefully on, some in good shape, others less so. Second, there has been an explosion in chronic conditions, like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia and respiratory disease, which are often linked to smoking, drinking and lack of physical activity.
Differences in those behaviours are one reason why people living in the South East of England, for example, are likely to enjoy eight more years of life free from disability than those who live in the North East, according to the Newcastle epidemiologist Carol Jagger.26
To get a handle on all of this, statisticians have started to track not only life expectancy but ‘healthy life expectancy’, defined as the years spent in ‘very good’ or ‘good’ health, and ‘disability-free life expectancy’: the years spent without any limiting condition. The methodology is not terribly robust as it’s all based on surveys people fill in, reporting how they feel. The categories are broad too: being in ‘poor health’ could mean that you suffer from arthritis and can’t walk as far as you used to, or that you have early stage dementia. There’s an urgent need for better data. But even so, the patterns are striking.
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