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I was going to ask an SSQ: has anyone done actuarial assessment for our two Presidential candidates?
Then I found this. As of 2020, Biden was given a 95% chance of surviving a full term, while Trump saw 90%. Both were ahead of their cohorts, mainly due to strong family history. This publication was breathlessly covered by news outlets.
It’s actually harder than I expected to find other analyses. Google started showing me policy-wonk suggestions about overall American life expectancy before it stopped telling me about Nikki Haley’s remarks.
A naive reading of this actuarial table gives the following numbers.
|Chance of dying in…|For someone 81 in ‘24|For someone 77 in ‘24|
|-|-|-|
|2024|7.1%|4.8%|
|2025|7.8%|5.3%|
|2026|8.6%|5.9%|
|2027|9.5%|6.5%|
|2028|10.5%|7.1%|
[edit: I swear the table looked fine in preview!]
I’m not sure if I combined the numbers correctly, but it looks like 63% of 81-year-olds will be alive at 86, and 74% of 77-year-olds make it to 82. While I’m sure peak medical care leaves Biden and Trump ahead of this curve…it doesn’t feel great. It feels like the kind of thing which should be trumpeted left and right!
So. Does anyone know of a more thorough analysis? Would anyone like to explain why we shouldn’t be worried about our President kicking the bucket?
I'm not sure how much, but you do have to adjust these probabilities downwards to account for the fact that neither has (as far as we know) currently been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
In any given year, a large chunk, probably a majority, of the people who die will have started the year already having some kind of terminal diagnosis. If you're currently in relatively good health for your age, your odds of dying on the near future are significantly lower than what simple actuarial tables say.
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Why do you think the Democratic establishment did their best to get Trump as the draw rather than Desantis or someone else younger?
The age attacks against Biden are devastating as it is, if they were launched by a candidate in their 50s or even 60s, they would land much harder. It is flatly disqualifying, and nothing about how Biden has run his white house would disabuse you of that notion. Nonetheless, changing horses midstream was probably always impossible, so the Dems had to do damage control, which meant trying to put him up against Trump. They've succeeded, much good may it do them. We'll see what happens in the debates. If it was DeSantis, Biden wouldn't make it out. Against Trump, it might all be so confusing that it doesn't matter.
That said, I'm reminded a lot of baseball perceptions of age when looking at how people perceive politicians. A lot of times fans will overestimate the age of a player who debuted younger, because they have been aware of him longer, and underestimate the age of a play who debuted older, because they didn't know about him before then. Mike Trout and Aaron Judge are the same age, but Trout is often perceived as older because he won Rookie of the Year at age 20 in 2012, while Judge won Rookie of the Year five years later at 25. Many times I've seen fans online call for a "young kid" from the minors to get a chance over a scuffling vet, and when you look at the numbers the minor leaguer is a year or two older than the major leaguer!
People perceive Biden as old in politics because he's been in politics so long, where Trump (while in the public consciousness longer) only entered politics in earnest in 2016.
Interesting take. I think a big part of why people perceive Biden as old is that he acts old whereas Trump has a lot more energy and generally is more present.
Then again I do struggle to model the normie political person so eh.
Part of me wonders though if there's a sort of psychological need in most people to feel a connection to a sort of wise, guiding elder, given that that role in our society has pretty much gone kaput. I do think we need wise older people to give the young guidance, but unfortunately our elders have either shat the bed, or just haven't been able to keep up with the extremely rapid pace of change. Probably a bit of both.
Isn't that to be somewhat expected of the elderly? I guess it depends. ;)
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist the opportunity you provided with that choice of idiom.)
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this doesn’t take into account lifestyle or stress. Being president is one of the most stressful jobs you can have as witnessed by the before and after photos of modern presidents. Add in that you can’t really do the job unless you’re pretty sharp, and I’m not going to choose based on a table for median American elders who are mostly retired to golf courses around the country, doing crafts, and yelling at the TV. Whether a high pressure job requiring high mental capacity helps or harms longevity, I’m not sure.
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Worried in what sense? Surely it's something we, as voters, ought to take into account when deciding who to vote for. It seems relatively more likely to happen to whoever the next president is than it normally does. But it's not like we've never had a president die in office before. We have a whole constitutional amendment laying out what to do if that happens.
Fair enough.
I guess I’m wondering if there’s any way to signal this displeasure. Or why it has barely been weaponized for the culture war.
Umm, conservative rhetoric is all about how Biden is just too old.
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Vote third party? Don't vote? It's a well known problem with FPTP that you don't have a lot of recourse if you don't like one of the two options on offer.
I'm not sure it hasn't been weaponized - I'm pretty sure the right points out Biden's age quite frequently.
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