Rich Man, Poor Man

In the United States, Congress commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to study the macroeconomic and policy implications of longer lifespans. [...] In the US, there is a growing gap in longevity between lower and higher earners, with almost no change in longevity in the bottom half of the population and substantial gains in the upper half.1 Canadian actuaries in both the public and private sectors have taken care to calculate the sensitivity of pension plans to changing longevity and have examined longevity differences between lower and highe [...] We consider men and women separately, recognizing that comparisons across cohorts of women are complicated because of the emergence of females in the workplace over the last 50 years, which changes the mix of women we can observe in our dataset through time. [...] Of course, because more women born in the 1950s were working than those born in the 1920s, this result embeds a different mix of women in the population of workers. [...] In the landmark study of the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine (2015), changes in US life expectancy between the 1930 and 1960 birth cohorts are negligible in the bottom two quintiles but is nearly seven years for the top quintile.