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Notes -
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?
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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