THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Isn’t the more relevant stat the probability of dying within the next four or eight years after election?  How many years beyond retirement an ex-president lives is presumably of little policy or electoral interest.  The CDC’s life table for 1999-2001 show a probability of a 72 year old American dying over the next four years to be about 12% to 13%, if I’ve calculated correctly.  Doing the same calculation for a 47-year old American I get a probability of between 1% and 2%.

Yes, you are correct that it is a better way of doing it.

Can you post a link to the mortality rates table you used, preferably of historical nature?

Also, I’ll presume that President is at a higher risk of death or incapacitation.  If the average 72-yr old has a life rate averaging 96.7% for each of the next 4 years, then a President probably knocks that down to say 95%?  That gives him a death rate of 18-19%.

Repeating for the 47-yr old, if we give him 99.7% for each of the next 4 years of living, then being President knocks him down to say 98%, for a death rate over the next 4 years of 8%.

The Palin-as-president issue is probably twice more likely a situation than Biden-as-president, if we only consider age and standard safety issues for all presidents.

It’s also possible that Obama may have other considerations that McCain doesn’t deal with.  I suspect racially-motivated death threats are more likely with Obama than McCain, though who knows how “real” those threats are.  On the other side, Obama may be more healthy than your average 47-yr old.  Or worse, since he is/was a smoker.  McCain has his own health issues that he dealt with, which may or may not be par for the course of 72-yr olds.

Somewhere, there is an Actuary or student who has looked at this issue and provided the life expectancy numbers.  Where is he?

My interest in a candidates age is more a function of their mental acuity at their age, rather than their probability of dying.  (Sounds like the media, in your eyes, is more concerned with the opposite?)

As our life expectancies increase, are we any better at physical or mental tasks at those ages than we were in generations past?  Or does the brain and body still decompose at the same rate, but we’re just helping the heart do a little better?  That’s what intrigues me, and might influence my vote.

While a President may be more at risk of death and disease because of stress, sleep, assassination, and other similar issues, on the other side of the coin, he gets the best medical care, has access to the best nutritional care, and gets screened all the time for cancer and other diseases, etc.  That has got to be worth a lot as one major reason people die at that age is due to undetected cancers and heart disease.

There’s a lot of data here:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/lftbls/lftbls.htm

Keep in mind also that male life expectancy is lower at every point than female, so overall population numbers will overestimate life expectancy for the average male.

Good point there. 

For a seemingly big issue, there seems to be little analysis reported on it.  Shouldn’t some actuarial firm come out with an analysis and go through the whole machinations, and come up with a range of results?  Or, are they simply trying to stay away from it because of the potential political heat?

At the very least, actuarial students in college would seem like perfect candidates to tackle this issue and get lots of publicity.

Part of the problem may be that the application of general life expectancies is of very little use in analyzing very specific individuals such as Obama and McCain.  Ther specific health backgrounds, lifestyles and other factors probably have more relevance to their life expectancies than overall actuarial tables.  It would be kind of like applying average baseball performance by age in an attempt to project 2009 performance by Albert Pujols and Ryan Langerhans.  They are the same age and therefore looking at average age performance you might project them to similar 2009 results.  But the unique aspects of the individual cases overwhelm the usefulness of the age average.

An example:  African-American males have much lower life expectancies on average than other Americans.  But that result is a consequence of other correlations based on economic status, access to health care, lifestyle and other matters with respect to which Obama’s mere status as an African-American male would have little relevance.  Doctors and sociologists may be of more use in this discussion than actuaries.

I am glad that you are now looking at other ways of dying besides natural death, and also taking into consideration that people have longer life expectancies now than they did 100 years ago.  I think two other considerations would be a look at McCain’s parents and grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents and how long they lived above or below their age group, and secondly you would need to look at the results of McCain’s physical in great detail and adjust based upon his current health.  When looking at a group you can be more general, when looking at an individual (one sample) you need more detail to make an accurate judgement on this.
vr, Xei

"What I would like is for guys who have a passion for this to report the life expectancy for all the presidents, going back as far as you can.”

In case anybody is still interested, going back as far as you can (that would be George Washington), I figure the average life of a (dead) president lasted 25866 days, or 70.9 years.  Which would McCain dead already.

OOPS, that should be: “Which would MAKE McCain dead already.”

With the youngest president about 42 and the oldest about 70 (when taking office) , the average age would be about 55.

That means the average president lived 15 years after taking office.

Now, the average year would be about 1900.

The life expentancy of a 55 year old man in 1900 is 17.88 years.

Pretty rough, but it works out that a president has about a normal life span, even with a high murder rate (4).

FWIW Someone told me there are 3 living WW I vets alive.

Birtelcom is right: the likelihood of dying within the next 4/8 years is the more relevant query.

And Mike also raises a very important point:  the likelihood of significant impairment of one’s mental faculties.  Most people have forgotten, but this was under serious consideration when Reagen was seeking to become (at the time) the oldest person ever elected President.  In fact, his campaign stated that Reagan would be willing to undergo periodic senility tests to assure Americans that he was still fit to serve.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,951325-2,00.html

In retrospect, that was a wise idea.  My impression of Reagan is that he began to slip badly around the time of the 1984 campaign, and that he was seriously impaired by the conclusion of his presidency in January 1989.  Senile dementia does not pop up all at once; it is typically gradual, and it became obvious by the time of Reagan’s Iran-Contra testimony that he was befuddled and suffering from fairly advanced dementia (ultimately determined to be Alzheimer’s).

Setting politics aside, I believe this is a serious issue when any candidate for high office is over approximately 65-70 years old.  We should not ignore it; it’s already happened to us once in recent history, and the issue should be clearly raised and addressed (as with Reagan’s “periodic senility testing” concept that was sadly never implemented) this time around.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/us-election/eyes-have-it-for-president-palin/2008/09/12/1220857835005.html