Life expectancy should be bigger news than it is
What makes a difference in life expectancy?
Tuesday, December 9th 2025, 6:19AM
In the article "Do lonely people have shorter lives?" published by The Economist on February 19, 2025, the author considers a range of risk factors and how they affect life and then chose to examine the health implications of loneliness and social isolation.
Being a current smoker increases your risk the most, having a high income decreases it the most.
The author chose to highlight loneliness – not living in a household with others.
The piece highlights that loneliness is a recognised risk factor for early mortality, with socially isolated individuals exhibiting increased levels of cellular inflammation.
This inflammation is linked to a higher risk of various health issues, including cardiovascular diseases and weakened immune function. This underscores the importance of social connections in promoting overall health and longevity. This is clearly an important issue, although perhaps not one over which the individual has as much control.
The issue of life expectancy crops up rarely in popular media.
One of those examples: it was a surprise to find a life expectancy feature in the war of words which has accompanied the recent imposition of Tariffs by the Trump administration on of the United States on Canada. One US Senator wrote on social media: “Name one thing that Canada does better than the United States” to which the reply was “Life expectancy” including a chart from the popular statistics site, Our World in Data.
Canada offers significantly higher life expectancy – adding about three years, more on an age-adjusted basis.
That is significant, and it's similar here, but Japan, adds a further two years, and our comparison of causes of early death suggests that if we could bring our performance up in about half a dozen areas we could jump to the top of the OECD.
We think life expectancy is something that we should all talk about more.
Life and health advisers already do, of course. The increase in wellbeing programmes has added to the push.
Investment advisers are talking more about mortality predictions to help with decumulation strategies.
Insurers should talk about more about it, even more than they currently do. They are naturally conservative and shun the limelight, but this, this is literally our business.
While acknowledging the work that is already done, there is more to be said.
In overseas markets insurers offer quitters rates to people trying to quit smoking. They lobby government for more successful interventions in health. We do not currently have an insurer promoting new weight loss medicines – yet the effects are clearly impressive. More balanced diets are available to everyone too – and little, even in wellbeing programmes explicitly promotes better nutrition.
It’s a subject we all have an interest in.
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