The UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries includes data from as far back as 1825 when calculating its life expectancy tables. Fundamental to those estimations is the importance of the correlation between income and life expectancy.
The effects of this relationship are still apparent today. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that the GDP per capita in the Polish IT hub Wroclaw increased from $23,000 in 2000 to $55,000 two decades later.
Wroclaw’s citizens saw their average life expectancy increase by 4.9 years in tandem with the influx of high paying jobs from tech giants such as Alphabet and IBM over the same period.
A change has occurred in the key drivers of living a longer, healthier life says Steve Prince, President of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA).
“Previous studies said that wealth was the major driver. But recent studies say that education is now a bigger factor than wealth,” said Prince.
Prince’s comments followed the publication of the CIA’s Education and Longevity insight by Shantel Aris, Peter Gorham, and Jie Ji, in March this year. The paper looked at a literature review by actuary Robert Brown, on behalf of the institute.
While wealth has historically been believed to be the primary driver of life expectancy and longevity, the research review by the CIA showed that it is increasingly likely that educational attainment is the primary driver of differences in both wealth and longevity.
The studies, which were examined by the CIA, produced consistent results according to Aris, Head of Longevity Experience Studies at Club Vita – the more education people have, the longer they live.
“The studies have brought forward the thinking that now education is a primary driver for both wealth and longevity,” she says.
“One of the challenges for the insurance industry is how to incorporate this research into life expectancy tables. At the moment education data is collected at an aggregate, not an individual, level by the industry.”
Aris says that while the insurance industry currently relies on postcodes as a proxy form of data for wealth this doesn’t allow for any degree of granularity over the level of education that an individual has.
“We work with postal code indicators and in those measures there is some element of the educational attainment of that area. But on an individual basis the datasets don’t have an indicator that this person achieved a university degree versus a person that didn’t complete high school.”
Aris says that while on an individual level education is not being used vary widely by the insurance industry it is being incorporated more and more at an aggregate level.”
“There’s an increasing amount of research into the idea that education is a primary driver of longevity,” she says.
But why is education potentially a better proxy for life expectancy than wealth? Smoking is the single most important factor. According to the CIA paper, smoking rates were almost four times higher among Canadians who didn’t complete high school compared with university graduates.
The same trend was apparent outside of Canada with the CIA research saying that smoking explains half of the recent widening of the educational difference in life expectancy in several European countries, with the trend especially notable for women.
“This is not a purely Canadian phenomenon. In our paper, we saw a significant gap between the life expectancy of the lowest and highest education groups which is consistent across multiple countries.
“There are differences between countries over what is classified as low versus high education but it was consistent that we saw a difference across multiple countries,” Aris says.
Strikingly, even among smokers, there are different life expectancy outcomes depending on the education level of the cigarette user. Aris says that this differential is potentially explained by higher levels of education leading to healthier lifestyle choices.
So, not only was there a greater percentage of smokers among lower education groups, they also experienced a higher level of mortality than their more educated peers.
Aris says that a plausible explanation for this difference is that better educated groups adopt otherwise more healthy lifestyles than their lower educated smoking peers.
“You see a trend where those with a higher education adopt healthier lifestyles and have improved access to health care. Those are some of the drivers that could explain the different outcomes for the same diseases between different social groups.”
Another intriguing aspect of the CIA paper is that spending on healthcare may have a bigger longer term impact on improving life expectancy than directly increasing healthcare funding.
“Improved education is a preventive measure – possibly suggesting that increased spending on schools might, to some degree, be a better expenditure than increasing spending on health care, especially high-tech and expensive health care.
“Certainly, it appears that increases in education can double as investments in long-term health,” said the CIA report.
A US study mentioned in the CIA report compared the effect of Americans achieving a college degree with advances made in biomedicine between 1996 and 2002.
According to the US study, more lives would have been extended from the increase in education than from the medical advances.
There are further potential longevity-linked benefits from increased education spending.
Statistics Canada looked at the relationship between income and education on life expectancy as well as on health adjusted life expectancy and found that not only did individuals with higher levels of education live longer, they also had more years of good health than lower education groups.
“Higher income leads to a longer life in good health. Lower income leads to a longer end of life period in poor health. More income or more wealth provides the means for better health care and better lifestyle, both of which can lead to better longevity,” said the report.
Causation and correlation are, of course, two different things.
And while the current research into the relationship between education and longevity suggests that wealth may be superseded as the primary driver of life expectancy calculations, Aris says that it is not clear whether the data indicates causation or correlation.
“To say there is a direct cause-effect relationship between education and longevity is a stretch based on the research studies explored in the original literature review. However, while education may not cause longevity directly, it drives longevity through its connection to better employment, income generation and information gathering.
“Higher education not only leads to longer life, but it also leads to longer life in good health. Given this benefit of higher educational attainment, further research on how investment in education can lead to a healthier society is a good next step.”
