Hey, Live to Be a 100 like a Tech Bro
October 8, 2024
If you, gentle reader, are like me, you have taken heart at tales of people around the world living past 100. Well, get ready to tamp down some of that hope. An interview at The Conversation declares, “The Data on Extreme Human Ageing Is Rotten from the Inside Out.” Researcher Saul Justin Newman recently won an Ig Nobel Prize (not to be confused with a Nobel Prize) for his work on data about ageing. When asked about his work, Newman summarizes:
“In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyze). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate. The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on. Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”
That is one way to go, we suppose. We learn of other places Newman found bad ageing data. Europe’s “blue zones” of Sardinia in Italy and Ikaria in Greece, for example. There can be several reasons for erroneous data. For example, wars or other disasters that destroyed public records. Or clerical errors that set the wrong birth years in stone. But one of the biggest factors seems to be pension fraud. We learn:
“Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.”
That does seem fishy. Especially since it is clear rich folks generally live longer than poor ones. (And that gap is growing, by the way.) So get those wills notarized, trusts set up, and farewell letters written sooner than later. We may not have as much time as we hoped.
Cynthia Murrell, October 8, 2024
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