Brain power can decline from age 45: study

"What a drag it is getting old"... ~ Mick Jagger

by Agence France-Presse
Friday, January 6, 2012

 

 

Cognitive skills can start to fall from the age of 45, not from around the age of 60 as is commonly thought, according to research published on Friday by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Researchers led by Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France and University College London observed 5,198 men and 2,192 women over a 10-year period from 1997.

The volunteers were London civil servants aged between 45 and 70 who had been enrolled in a long-term health study.

Over the 10 years, the participants were tested three times — for memory, vocabulary, and skills in aural and visual comprehension.

During this time, there was a 3.6-percent decline in mental reasoning in men aged 45-49 and a 9.6-percent fall in those aged 65-70. The corresponding figures for women were 3.6 and 7.4 percent.

“Cognitive decline is already evident in middle age,” says the paper, which defines this as the years from 45 to 49.

The findings should spur further research into spotting and braking cognitive deterioration, the authors hope.

Many societies face an “exponential increase” in the number of elderly people as a result of increases in life expectancy, they note.

“These changes are likely to have a profound influence on individuals’ lives and society at large. Poor cognitive status is perhaps the single most disabling condition in old age.”

The vulture funds of death

 Source: SCMP - May 21, 2011  

Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase, which bundled and sold billions of dollars of mortgage loans, now want to help investors bet on people's deaths.

Pension funds sitting on more than $23 trillion of assets are buying insurance against the risk their members live longer than expected.

Investment banks see this as an opportunity to package that risk into bonds and other securities and create a new market for those willing to bet on life-expectancy rates. If pensioners die sooner than expected, investors profit. If they live longer, investors must compensate the pension fund for the additional costs it faces.

The hard part: finding buyers willing to take on the bets that may take 20 years or more to play out.

"Banks are increasingly looking to offer derivative solutions," said Nardeep Sangha, 43, chief executive officer of Abbey Life Assurance, a London-based Deutsche Bank unit that helps pension funds manage the risk of retirees living longer than expected. "Making the long maturity of the risks palatable for investors, including sovereign wealth funds, private-equity firms and specialist funds, is the challenge."

As insurers reach the limit of how much pension-fund liability they are willing to shoulder, companies such as JPMorgan and Prudential last year set up a group aimed at establishing and standardising a secondary market for so-called longevity risks.

They are also developing indexes that measure mortality rates and securities to let pension funds pay fixed premiums to investors in return for coverage against major deviations from projections.

Swiss Re, the world's second-biggest reinsurer, sold the world's first longevity bond in December in what it called a "test case" to sell risk to the capital markets.

Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank have set up insurance companies that promise to pay pensions if retirees live beyond a certain age. They typically receive a portion of the pension plan's assets in return. The banks, along with Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and UBS, are looking for ways to offer this risk to investors.

"Ultimately, reinsurance capacity for longevity risks will run dry, and that's why it's imperative that as the market grows and develops it is able to bring in new types of risk-takers," Sangha said.
"The obvious channel is the capital markets."

Medical advances and healthier lifestyles have made predicting life spans more difficult for pension funds. Life expectancy in the United Kingdom is increasing by one to three months every year, according to Dutch insurer Aegon. Every year of additional life expectancy typically adds as much as 4 per cent to future pension requirements, Aegon said in a report in March.
Pension funds can hedge against life-expectancy risk by transferring assets to an insurer or other counterparty that promises to pay some or all of the future liabilities.

Last year, GlaxoSmithKline, the UK's biggest drug maker, became the 10th FTSE 100 firm to buy insurance on about £900 million (HK$11.3 billion), or 15 per cent, of its UK pension obligations. That means Prudential, the UK's largest insurer, rather than the pension fund, will pay some GlaxoSmithKline pensioners should they live longer than expected.

"We're seeing more and more sophisticated mechanisms being offered," said Bill Galvin, CEO of the UK's Pensions Regulator. "From a regulatory perspective, we are concerned to ensure that trustees understand the extent to which longevity risk has been passed from their scheme, and the precise shape of any residual risk."

The UK is the world's biggest market for insuring pension liabilities after a change in accounting rules in 2004 forced companies to include pension plans on their balance sheets, increasing the volatility of earnings.

Since then, £30 billion of liabilities have been insured, about 3 per cent of the total outstanding, according to estimates by Hymans Robertson, a London-based pension consultant.

Banks and insurers completed a record £8.2 billion in longevity-risk transfers last year.

Goldman Sachs-owned Rothesay Life sold the most pension-plan insurance in 2010, while Deutsche Bank's Abbey Life completed the biggest swaps deal.

Investors may be attracted to betting on life-expectancy rates because longevity trends are not linked to movements in equities, bonds or commodity markets, said David Blake, director of the pensions institute at Cass Business School in London, who has worked with JPMorgan on the derivatives.

The complexity and risk involved in longevity assets with timelines of more than 20 years means banks are looking to create bonds that offer 5 per cent to 9 per cent in annual returns, according to Guy Coughlan, former head of longevity structuring at JPMorgan. Returns as high as the "mid-teens" are possible, he said.

But not knowing whether a bet on a group of pensioners' life spans is correct for decades prevents some hedge funds, such as London-based Leadenhall Capital Partners, from entering the marketplace. Luca Albertini, CEO of Leadenhall, said the longevity market simply was not liquid enough.

Subprime mortgages sold in the past decade were the genesis of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Investment banks passed the risk of borrowers defaulting to the capital markets by packaging, or securitising, the loans into bonds and selling them to investors and one another.

Collateralized debt obligations were sold in such volume that when mortgage holders defaulted, governments in the US and Europe had to bail out the financial system. In much the same way, banks are now looking to securitise the risk of pensioners living longer than expected.

Securities based on life expectancy do not hold the same risks as those linked to subprime mortgages because they are "fully collateralised", minimising the risk from a counterparty failing to meet its obligations, Coughlan said.

However, David McCourt, senior policy adviser at the UK's National Association of Pension Funds, said: "There's a massive counterparty risk. People say insurance companies don't go bust, but they do. We've seen AIG and investment banks going under like Lehman.

"There's a lot of pressure on the trustees to make sure they're comfortable the deal is right because there's no going back."

Rothesay Life, the biggest pension liability insurer in the UK last year, has not joined JPMorgan and Prudential in the new London-based Life & Longevity Markets Association.  Managing Director Tom Pearce said it preferred to develop the market alone and did not expect it to be easy.

"Clearly, if there was a capital market solution that would be helpful for the market generally, but there are some challenges," he said. "The biggest is selling these very long-term risks to shorter-dated investors."

Demographic Nonsense

Nationalist Fear Mongering
By DEAN BAKER

The debate over the demographic trends in the United States and other wealthy countries can be described a debate between those who care about our children and those who want more of them. This is apparent once a little bit of logic is applied to the tales of demographic disaster being hawked by those concerned about declining birth rates and greater longevity.

The basic story is that we are seeing a declining ratio of workers to retirees. This is supposed to mean that our children and our grandchildren will have an unbearable burden supporting us in our old age. In the United States the story is that we now have about three workers for each retiree. In 20 years this ratio is supposed to drop to two.

In countries like Germany and Japan the decline is somewhat greater, since they have lower birth rates, and in the case of Japan, less immigration. They also have somewhat more rapid gains in longevity.

This basic story has managed to make otherwise sane people seriously fearful about the country and the world's future. A quick statistic that should alleviate the fears is that the ratio of workers in retirees in the United States was 5 to 1 back in the 60s, far higher than the current 3 to 1 ratio.

That's right, boys ands girls, aging is not new. As a result of modern medical technology and high living standards, life expectancies have been increasing for a long time. And, just as no one now blames our current economic problems on the larger percentage of retirees in the population, there is no reason to believe that in 30 or 40 years that it will be an important factor depressing living standards.

The reason that we are on average much wealthier today even though we have a much larger population of retirees is productivity growth. Productivity growth has averaged over 2.0 percent annually over the last 50 years. (It has averaged 2.5 percent over the last 15 years.) If productivity growth averages 2.0 percent a year, then in 20 years workers will be on average be producing almost 50 percent more in an hour of work. In 40 years they will be producing 120 percent more in an hour of work. Such gains in output will allow our children and grandchildren to enjoy much higher living standards than workers today, even while supporting a larger population of retirees.

While no serious economist would dispute this basic arithmetic, the demographic scare pushers invariably come back with stories about labor shortages. This is a cheap trick. In a dynamic market economy there are always labor shortages in the sense that some businesses cannot profitably hire workers at the prevailing wage.

This is the reason that half of the U.S. workforce is not still employed in agriculture. Farm workers had better paying opportunities in the cities creating labor shortages on farms. As aging slows the growth in the labor force we may expect to see some tightening in the labor market (i.e. unemployment falls).

This means that workers can be more selective in the jobs they choose. Perhaps no one will want to work the midnight shift at convenience stores. This could mean that Wal-Mart will have to pay their clerks more and hotels and restaurants will have to offer higher wages for housekeepers, bellhops, and dishwashers.

Higher wages will be in part passed on in higher prices, which means that we might have somewhat fewer convenience stores, Wal-Marts, hotels and restaurants. The least productive jobs will go unfilled. This is what always happens in a dynamic economy. What is the problem?

In fact, measured productivity numbers are unlikely to pick up the fill gains that may be associated with lower populations. Large populations and crowding put enormous stress on the environment. Imagine having commute times cut in half if smaller populations eliminated rush hour congestion. This would not be picked up in productivity measures.

Similarly, increased access to desirable locations, such as lower prices for waterfront property, would not be picked up conventional measures of productivity. And of course the reduced pollution, including lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions, would also not be picked up in standard measures of productivity.

So, what's the problem with low birth rates and declining populations? Well, for some people I just described it. The folks at the top don't like to think of a world where workers can tell the manager at Wal-Mart to shove it. The idea of a world in which ordinary workers really do have serious job options (the one we used to know) is a nightmare.

Some of the demographic fear mongers are openly nationalist in the sense that they want the United States or their home country to be a great power in the world. The ability of a country to flex its economic and military power will depend on its level of economic development and also to some extent on its population.

For these belligerent nationalists, the problem is that there may not be enough children for future national leaders to be sufficiently powerful. In other words, the problem is not that our children and grandchildren will be suffering, but rather that their leaders will not be the big tough boys and girls that the demographic fear mongers idealize.

In short, there is no demographic problem facing wealthy countries. The only problem is that people with poor math skills and imperialistic designs hold positions of influence and power.

US slips to 49th in life expectancy

By Sahil Kapur - Monday, October 18th, 2010

The United States currently ranks 49th in the world in overall life expectancy, according to a study published in the academic journal Health Affairs, slipping dramatically during the last decade.

"As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined," concludes the study, conducted by Columbia University health policy professors Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, which will appear in the November edition of the influential peer-reviewed journal.

The noteworthy decline is highlighted by the fact that in 1999, the World Health Organization ranked the US as 24th in the world in the same category, life expectancy.

The report by Muenning and Glied found the prime culprit of the plunge to be America’s deteriorating health care system, marred by ever-rising costs and growing numbers of uninsured and under-insured individuals.

Noting that the United States spends over twice as much per capita on health care than other industrialized nations, it adds: "The observation that Americans are spending relatively more on health but living relatively shorter, less healthy lives has led some critics to allege that the US health care system is 'uniquely inefficient.'"

The findings present a stark contrast to the claim – today an article of faith in the American conservative movement – that the United States has the best health care system in the world.

The United States, as is widely known, remains the only advanced democracy without a universal health care program. But sweeping reform legislation enacted by this March, while limited in its capacity for cost controls, offers a significant step towards universality – it is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to insure 94 percent of Americans in ten years, up from 83 percent today.

The authors of the report also posited that high rates of obesity, smoking, homicides and traffic fatalities may have contributed to the decline.

The study was flagged by a Daily Kos blogger and elevated by Glenn Greenwald of Salon. Apart from coverage in some blogs, medical journals, and an article by Reuters, it received scant attention in the mainstream US press.

The Poor Must Die

Anglo-American Political Philosophy 101
By CHRIS FLOYD

News from Blighty: the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921. The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2007, "for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas."

The Journal study said that the data suggest "it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention" that kept the disparity from being greater. On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish "New Labour" government (or as the BMJ more politely puts it, "the prolonged state disengagement in promoting equality in outcome") helped stretch the yawning gap even further.

In other words, the few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.

Now, even those few pence are being stripped away -- gleefully -- by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism. The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition "partner," the lapdog Lib Dems) will sends millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass -- and finally, after 60 years of trying, gut the national health service with a stealth "Americanization" that will turn the operation of local doctors' offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals, allowing them to "fail" -- and close -- if they don't produce enough cash for their elite shareholders. Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove, who is plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite "national greatness" ideology on the young. Gove is also using "emergency" legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.

This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs. Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fearmongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece. As with the fearmongering about "Iraqi WMDs," the "dangers of the deficit" are being exaggerated -- and manufactured -- in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: neo-feudal oligarchism.

But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the "market-led reforms" imposed by New Labour. And "New Labour" was of course a close copy of the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton and his clique of "triangulating" bagmen for Big Money -- scarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty's second turn in the White House. And we all know that "continuity" is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.

Thus for more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakeable adherence to the perpetuation -- and expansion -- of elite power and privilege. They have shown themselves willing -- eager -- to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith. The poor have no place in this system, which is a retrograde, hi-tech, rhetorically sugarcoated revival of the laissez-faire fantasies of the past, as Jeremy Seabrook notes:

"'Pauperism' long ago took on the colour of culpability. The distinction between the idle and improvident poor and the "deserving" goes back at least to the Elizabethan poor law. It took on a new force in the early industrial era, which saw an unprecedented growth in pauperism. The enthusiasts of laissez-faire concluded that the evil was compounded by efforts to relieve it, and helping the poor only increased their number. Everything indicated that "natural" processes should be allowed to take their course. .... In this version of the world, the market mechanism is as flawless a creation as the earth, and should remain untouched by the hand of meddlers, whose only effect is to upset its power to enrich us all. It is remarkable that the establishment of laissez-faire itself in the early 19th century required an enormous amount of government intervention and regulation ..."

And so it is today. The "regulation" of the health care industry introduced by the Obama Administration is actually a gargantuan transfer of wealth, by force, from working people and the poor to a few huge corporations. The financial "regulation" signed into law is yet another sham that will leave the rapacious fools and fraudsters who brought down the global economy -- and triggered the convenient "deficit crisis" by demanding massive bailouts of public money for their private businesses -- at large and in charge of the world's finances. Meanwhile, more and more government regulations restrict the right of ordinary citizens to challenge the rich and powerful in court, or to register a public protest (herding them instead into the truly hideous "free speech zones") -- even as the state grants corporations extraordinary privileges to interfere with the political process with their vast resources and protects their leaders from personal accountability for the ravages they commit. The government "intervention and regulation" on behalf of the industries and elites who service the endlessly expanding symbiosis of corporate, military and 'security' power -- stretching even to the countenancing and cover-up of torture and murder -- is one of the defining elements of our age.

And as Glenn Ford notes, Obama is preparing to "regulate" the last tattered fragments of the social welfare system -- already decimated by the progressive's favorite good old boy, Bill Cinton -- right out of existence:

"In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been "on the table," as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called "deficit commission" is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush. Barack Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight. Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal."

This is the system -- the creed, the extremist faith -- that all "serious" players in all the "major" power faction on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to. Their god of greed demands human sacrifices: and so the poor must die. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor: first those in the "outer darkness" of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred "Homelands" themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades -- but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.

As I once noted here awhile back of some our representative elites:

"Perhaps if they could obtain these same privileges as easily by other, less horrific means, they would. As it is, they take the world as they find it, and go about their business without fretting over the consequences -- the dead, the ruined, the spreading hate, the poisoned planet. Why should they care? As the maggot cannot see beyond the meat, so too these [people] of greed-stunted understanding can see nothing of worth outside their own bottomless appetites."