Earlier this month, an unusual prize ceremony got under way. Five Nobel laureates gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not to receive further accolades themselves, but to present the Ig Nobel prizes. Now in their 34th year, these are awarded to researchers whose discoveries “make people laugh, then think”.
One winner was Saul Justin Newman, whose research probing the quality of demographic data certainly made me laugh and think. Places with surprising clusters of individuals reaching remarkable ages, with centenarians or even supercentenarians (aged 110+) galore, attract lots of attention. Debates focus on their secrets – from Mediterranean diets to superior genetics.
But Newman argues that the real secret is that many of these super-senior citizens exist only on paper. He shows that in the US, when a state introduced birth certificates, often towards the end of 19th century, there was a 69-82% fall in supercentenarians recorded. Maybe birth certificates harm our health… or, more plausibly, they cleanse dodgy data.
Even better is his work on Europe. It shows super-oldies are correlated with how rich a region is. But not in the way you’d expect: poorer and deprived places record most people living to the oldest ages – odd, when those regions have terrible health outcomes on every other metric.
Despite having high poverty and the lowest proportion of people aged 90+, Tower Hamlets somehow records more people aged 105+ per capita than anywhere else in England. Corsica is apparently stuffed full of the super-old, yet is very poor (and has France’s highest murder rate).
What’s going on? Pension fraud, because deprived areas create financial pressures, not greater longevity. Something to think, but not laugh, about.
• Torsten Bell is Labour MP for Swansea West and author of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back
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