Why life expectancy in Japan may in fact be a bit lower

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/09/pensions

by cwan • 16 years ago

21 23 16 years ago

I heard through a New York Times article that the data they use to calculate life expectancy is from the census (which is accurate), while the missing elderly are in other records. So it doesn't appear the life expectancy figure is in question.

NYTimes: Japan’s Elderly Count Was Off by 234,000 http://nyti.ms/cim254

I apologize for the shortened url, I'm on a mobile device.

natrius2• 16 years ago

Why are they assuming that the census data is accurate? I don't see how it would be any harder to falsify. It's relatively easy to check for individuals who don't show up in any other government data or are known to be dead, but if the government thinks they're alive, why would a household not include the dead person?

Then again, I don't know how Japan's census actually works.

patio112• 16 years ago

A census official comes to your house, gives you a piece of paper to fill out about your household, asks you a few questions, and then departs.

Here's the miscalculation: pension benefits are administered by the pension office of the city you live in. Unlike America, everyone is registered at the local town office. When you move between towns, you're supposed to a notification with the old town and the new town. They don't synch their records, which are still kept mostly on paper. Thus, if I were hypothetically an old man who lived with my family in Nagoya, then moved to an old folk's home in Ogaki (establishing a new household there), the pension system would not necessarily catch me drawing pensions in two places. If I subsequently expire in Ogaki, notification of my death will update Ogaki's records, but nobody will call Nagoya to tell them "Hey, this guy who shouldn't be on your books anymore is dead now."

If this strikes you as a mindbogglingly inefficient way to run a national pension system worth trillions, wait until I tell you about the time where they discovered they had just totally lost the records of the existence of several million people.

howard_yeh• 16 years ago

passive income ftw

scythe• 16 years ago

So... this would mean that all of those things that we assume make you live longer "because they do them in Japan" are bullshit, correct?

VMG• 16 years ago

depends on the data sources - I assume they use different data for these kinds of studies

smashing• 16 years ago

Looks like it. Now can they check the French out because I have a hard time believing a high cholesterol diet and smoking doesn't have a negative effect on longevity.

maxawaytoolong• 16 years ago

the bullshit part is that people think the japanese actually do those things that make you live longer. maybe everyone in japan ate an okinawan diet... in okinawa, 200 years ago. japan today is one of the worlds largest beer consuming countries. They are hardcore smokers, junk food fiends, hanbaagaa setto aficionados, subject themselves to 2 hour train rides, oppressive family lives, bipolar attitudes towards sex (lots of porn; little actual sex), insane work hours or unemployed shut-ins, and so on and so forth. If anything the longevity of the japanese is a counterexample to what most people think makes people live longer...

cdavid2• 16 years ago

You are overly exaggerating things. First, concerning junk food, it is nowhere near what you find in the US, especially quantity-wise (to give a stupid example, the biggest menu in Mc Donald's in Japan is smaller than the smallest thing you can get in the US). The figures for obesity, while rising, are nowhere near the US or West Europe figures.

I don't see how the attitude toward sex or oppressive family are linked to life expectancy.

yummyfajitas3• 16 years ago

Probably not. The US does not have the same statistical problems Japan does, but Japanese Americans live 2 years longer than Japanese.

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...

mkramlich• 16 years ago

This reminds me of another interesting aspect of Japan that may be related to this issue. Of all the high-tech big-GDP countries, Japan is one of the most homogenous racially/ethnically. Not perfectly so (looks at patio11), but much more so than say the US, Canada, UK, France, etc.

quant18• 16 years ago

Women over 103 and men over 98 are not included in Japan's life expectancy statistics. So most of the fake centenarians will simply have absolutely no effect. This was repeatedly pointed out in the Japanese media when this scandal came to light a month ago.

E.g. http://www.nishinippon.co.jp/nnp/item/190712

(Google translated: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h... ... edit: I see that the machine translation managed to invert the sense of the last paragraph. The official quote there is actually "Even with this problem, we probably will NOT have to revise the average longevity".)

Unfortunately this factoid has been ignored in the Anglophone media, leaving it to a few nutcases on bulletin boards and blogs to try to get the word out (there is even a guy in the Economist comments section who mentions this).

Why life expectancy in Japan may in fact be a bit lower

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