Trump v. Biden Take Two - Using Social Security Mortality Assumptions

Yep, I'm doing the calculations. Again.

Jan 27, 2024

It looks like we’re getting Trump v. Biden for 2024, as we had for 2020 — and they’re both old guys.

The question arises: will they live to see inauguration day? How about living out to the end of a second term?

I have done these calculations multiple times before, and I will link prior times I did this at the bottom of this post so you can see how this has (or has not) changed.

Simplifying Assumptions

There are a whole bunch of assumptions that go into calculating survival probabilities.

While there is good reason to make approximations for fractional ages, etc., when one is working in life insurance and has a large population to work with, when it’s only two people and one has only sketchy info on their health, there’s really little good reason to quibble on those points.

So I’m using simplifications.

I will be using the following ages:
1. Joe Biden: 81 years old
2. Donald Trump: 77 years old
I will calculate survival probabilities using two different life tables, to show the impact of different mortality assumptions:
1. the Social Security 2019 period table, male
2. the Social Security 2020 period table (that link goes to the current Social Security table, and may resolve to a different table if you come back years later), male
I’m checking for survival over:
1. one year (that will be for the inauguration)
2. 5 years (that will be the end of the second term, whichever is president)

The 2020 period table does have the COVID impact, so no, it’s not necessarily going to be “realistic”. I’m throwing that in there for other purposes.

So let’s check for results!

2019 Mortality Assumption Results

Okay, let’s see what we get.

So, let’s take a look — a 6% or 4% chance of not making it to inauguration.

Guys, that’s actually a high mortality rate.

But then, you can see the 5-year result — we have survival rates that are less than 80%. That’s not great.

I know most people aren’t used to thinking about this, but there’s a reason I prefer to graph mortality rates using a vertical log scale.

Steepness of the Mortality Curve

This is what it looks like with a log scale.

You can see that death probabilities start at about 1% around age 60 for males. It’s nearly 10% at age 90.

2020 Mortality Assumption Results

Remember, the 2020 tables include the Covid mortality results from that year.

Let’s see what impact that has.

For the 1-year survival rates, those drop by 1 percentage point.

For the 5-year survival rates, those drop by 4 percentage points.

These were already not great survival rates. You can see that Covid did have effects on senior mortality, but the mortality effects are small compared to already being old.

People forget the steepness of the mortality curve once you hit the “acceleration” part of the ramp.

People tend to notice once they hit that part of the hill themselves.

Or they try to ignore it.

To be sure, these are using the mortality tables for the general population, and no matter what you think about Biden’s and Trump’s individual health statuses, they can at least walk at their ages. Not everybody can.

That is one health indicator.

Just saying.