Can Radical Life Extension Happen Again? Relevance for Life Settlements

One of the most attractive investment features of life settlements is the regularity and predictability of human survival. In fact, for those of us that study longevity for a living, it is well known that one feature of human longevity that has never changed throughout history is the age trajectory of death. This means the risk of death doubles every seven to eight years after puberty – a feature of human survival that is as constant as the sunrise every day. This constancy has been referred to as a “law of mortality”.  

While investors in this asset class should be assured by this “law”, this doesn’t mean people won’t live longer. In fact, the rise in life expectancy and survival to extreme old age has been one of the more fascinating features of human mortality dynamics in the last 150 years and has been largely a byproduct of humanity’s successful efforts to combat disease. We live longer now because we actively pursue life extension through medical and public health interventions – not because a long life was endowed upon us all.  

Why is this distinction important? Because a debate has emerged in the last few decades that might have given some pause about investing in life settlements out of a fear that most people today will live to 100 or older. 

I can pinpoint the exact source of this claim – it came from a mathematical demographer who created a historical “best practice” life expectancy table showing the countries with the highest life expectancies across time.  

He then extrapolated this into the future and concluded from it that most people will live to 100. This is equivalent to projecting that all of us can run a four-minute mile because a few can do so. Based on a new research paper I’ve written with colleagues that will soon be published, I can assure you this is highly unlikely to happen in this century. 

Back in 1990, my colleagues and I published an article in Science in which we estimated that the maximum life expectancy for humans is about 85 years – 88 for females and 82 for males.  

Since these are population averages, a lot of people would need to survive beyond ages 90 and 100 for this maximum life expectancy to occur. Shortly after our paper came out, some mathematical demographers vehemently disagreed with this view – claiming instead that advances in medical technology would occur in this century at an accelerated pace, resulting in an acceleration in the rise in life expectancy and that most people would live to ages 100 and older.  

These were two diametrically opposed viewpoints about the future of human longevity that would have profound implications for everything associated with survival – including among them, investments in life settlements. If these researchers were right, life settlements would be an unwise investment because the estimates of survival by those companies responsible for generating them, would likely underestimate longevity – yielding much smaller ROIs or even negative returns. 

Three decades have now passed since this debate began so it’s possible to use empirical evidence to determine which of these two opposed views about human longevity actually occurred and is likely to occur in the future. 

So, what exactly did we find? We examined several population-based survival metrics for nine of the longest-lived populations in the world from 1990-2019: 

1) annual average rate of improvement in life expectancy at birth;  

2) proportion of birth cohorts expected to live to 100;  

3) reduction in mortality required for life expectancy at birth to increase (referred to as life table entropy); and  

4) lifespan inequality (a metric that shows compression or expansion of the survival distribution).  

It’s worth noting that radical life extension occurred only once for humans in our history – during the 20th century – when life expectancy at birth arose by about three years per decade. If radical life extension had been occurring or is likely to do so in the future, the rate of increase in life expectancy would need to be at least at this pace observed in the past. 

Based on the last three decades of observed mortality in the longest-lived populations, the annual improvement in life expectancy at birth that operationally defines radical life extension was never reached except briefly in South Korea.  

The rise in life expectancy decelerated rapidly from 2010-2019 against a tailwind of medical advances that should have had the opposite effect. The percentage reduction in total mortality required to raise life expectancy at birth by one year increased uniformly across time in all countries.  

Lifespan inequality declined consistently – which means the distribution of death is compressing instead of shifting or expanding, and life table entropy increased and converged – implying that future increases in life expectancy will be even more difficult to accomplish than today. All metrics of human mortality change since 1990 indicate clearly that radical life extension did not occur, and it is not occurring now.  

We concluded that the era of rapid increases in life expectancy due to the first longevity revolution has come to an end. Radical life extension now appears to be implausible in this century and no more than 10-15 percent of babies born in 2019 are likely to survive to age 100. While humanity’s battle for a long life has largely been accomplished and should be considered a success story for public health and medicine, medical interventions should now focus on extending healthy life rather than increasing length of life.  

Humanity is now at a point in our survival story such that most people that reach ages 65 and older are living on what we refer to as “manufactured time” – survival time created by medical technology and public health.  

We can continue to create Band-Aids for the things that go wrong with us as we grow older, but the older we become, the more difficult it becomes to manufacture life. Life’s game of whack-a-mole has pushed us into age windows where the moles appear more rapidly and closer together – making further life extension more difficult, unless we change the rules of the game. In the end, we concluded that a second longevity revolution of a fundamentally different kind is approaching in the form of modern efforts to slow biological aging (Geroscience) – offering humanity a second chance at altering the course of human survival.

S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D. is Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Lapetus Solutions