Prolong and Actuaries

A couple thoughts:

1- From everything I've read inflation is not rampant in the (Manticoran) Honorverse. If inflation is kept well below current US levels, perhaps no more than 1% (which, imo, would be fantastic for us as well) there would not be major issues there. At a sub-1% rate bank accounts would be satisfactory for mid-term (5-10 year horizon) savings, while diversified investments in capital markets as well as diversified investments in real property (which, for this sake, I'm assuming is around. Basically, something like a mutual fund that purchases real property for the long term growth potential instead of securities).

2- For some reason I remember reading something about how prolong is able to keep people alive and youthful for a much longer period of time, but that it eventually fails and age resumes it's march. E.g., someone like White Haven is 'frozen' at an older age for decades, and as prolong wears off he begins to age at a natural rate. Honor, on the other hand, was 'frozen' in her teens/20s and will spend a couple centuries in that state before her aging resumes at a more natural rate. From the Pearls of Weber:

"In HH's universe, the cellular changes which accompany/cause the aging process are shut down for a couple of centuries. The factors within the genetic code which cause an organism's cells to "forget" how to reproduce themselves perfectly are neutralized, but all other physiological processes continue at their normal rates.
What happens at the end of the prolong process is that the neutralization of cellular amnesia wears off and the individual begins aging--at what we would consider a normal rate--from the point at which the original aging process had been arrested. Thus someone frozen in his/her mid-twenties would probably live at least another 60+ years (given the other medical advances available to them) from the time his/her generation of prolong wore off."

So, it appears that actuaries still only have to deal with the natural '60-death' period of someone. Even if they live for 300 years, roughly ~250 of those years will be spent 'stuck' in their physical 20s/30s (absent stress, deprivation, drugs, etc).

dscott8 wrote: I do not recall any truly elderly prolong recipients in the saga, but if the post-prolong pattern is an evenly proportioned extension of lifespan, I suspect the elder years will be eased by medical advances in treating typical problems of aging, like arthritis, phlebitis & Alzheimer's.

There aren't any elderly prolong recipient (yet), prolong hasn't been around long enough yet. It's only been around 90 years between the invention of 1st gen prolong and the current events in the Honorverse - and the cutoff age was IRC low to mid 20s for first gen. So the oldest living Prolong recipient can't be much over 115.
Nobody's lived even half the expected prolong lifespan. (Heck, whoever the oldest living person in the Honorverse currently is wouldn't be a prolong recipient because the process hasn't been around long enough)

Jonathan_S wrote:
Nobody's lived even half the expected prolong lifespan. (Heck, whoever the oldest living person in the Honorverse currently is wouldn't be a prolong recipient because the process hasn't been around long enough)

Which is why it's going to severely suck to be in the leading edge. Gerontology is going to go from a mention in the chapter in medical school on 'rare conditions you will never actually encounter in real life' to an everyday thing in a few years.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
Nobody's lived even half the expected prolong lifespan. (Heck, whoever the oldest living person in the Honorverse currently is wouldn't be a prolong recipient because the process hasn't been around long enough)

Which is why it's going to severely suck to be in the leading edge. Gerontology is going to go from a mention in the chapter in medical school on 'rare conditions you will never actually encounter in real life' to an everyday thing in a few years.

Oh it'll suck, but I don't think it'll be quite that extreme.

It's not just the very oldest Prolonged doctors that would have been, and remain, involved in treating the last of the the pre-prolong generation. So you'll have some doctors and nurses who were involved in research and treatment of elderly conditions who are a few decades younger than the leading edge of the Prolonged. They won't have had recent experience when the everyday reality returns -- but they'll have more that what you can get just from dusty old textbooks.

Plus there will always be a trickle of that work due to a trickle people who are too old for Prolong managing to immigrate from Verge to more prosperous systems. And there are probable some doctors without borders style interstellar humanitarian organizations that would keep a handful of doctors working in systems that still can't afford prolong.

So it won't be a complete reboot from textbooks only - but a lot of the industry that supports the elderly (home assistants, retirement and nursing homes, etc) would have to be rebuilt because the century of minimal (but non-zero) demand within the prosperous systems would have led it to go out of business -- even though people who worked in it would still be around - some of them young enough to potentially return to that work for a few more decades

Conversation with my 85 year old mum, the question of Soldiers Group Life Insurance came up. What would service dependents' benefits look like in around 2000 years in the future?

Would Anton Zilwiki have gotten a lump sum pay out after his wife's death? Would he have collected an ongoing dependent's allowance for his daughter? Would the service have refused to add Berry and Lars to his late wife's dependent list for benefits purposes?

Just some silly questions for y'all.

kenl511 wrote:Conversation with my 85 year old mum, the question of Soldiers Group Life Insurance came up. What would service dependents' benefits look like in around 2000 years in the future?

Would Anton Zilwiki have gotten a lump sum pay out after his wife's death? Would he have collected an ongoing dependent's allowance for his daughter? Would the service have refused to add Berry and Lars to his late wife's dependent list for benefits purposes?

Just some silly questions for y'all.

In reality I think they would have to go to a lump sum system. This is because the US finally finished paying widows benefits from the americal civil war in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Janeway

Add prolong to the mix and you could be looking at a close to millenium commitment.

Silverwall wrote:

kenl511 wrote:Conversation with my 85 year old mum, the question of Soldiers Group Life Insurance came up. What would service dependents' benefits look like in around 2000 years in the future?

Would Anton Zilwiki have gotten a lump sum pay out after his wife's death? Would he have collected an ongoing dependent's allowance for his daughter? Would the service have refused to add Berry and Lars to his late wife's dependent list for benefits purposes?

Just some silly questions for y'all.

In reality I think they would have to go to a lump sum system. This is because the US finally finished paying widows benefits from the americal civil war in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Janeway

Add prolong to the mix and you could be looking at a close to millenium commitment.

Don't see any problem with benefits for dependent children, cutting off when they could no longer reasonably expect to be dependent on their deceased parent. With 'modern' medicine the numbers of permanently seriously disabled dependants are going to be tiny so they are a special case that can probably be accommodated. So, yes, for benefits for Helen till she graduated from the Academy. Lars and Berry were never dependants of Mrs Zilwicki, so no benefits for them.

ACW widow's pensions were conceived in days when women generally had much poorer educational opportunities than men and almost no way of earning a decent living, especially if they had young children, NTM that divorce was almost unknown. In the Honorverse none of those things hold, so I would be surprised if benefits for a surviving spouse hadn't been seriously re-thought.

Randomiser wrote:[uote="Silverwall"]

kenl511 wrote:Conversation with my 85 year old mum, the question of Soldiers Group Life Insurance came up. What would service dependents' benefits look like in around 2000 years in the future?

Would Anton Zilwiki have gotten a lump sum pay out after his wife's death? Would he have collected an ongoing dependent's allowance for his daughter? Would the service have refused to add Berry and Lars to his late wife's dependent list for benefits purposes?

Just some silly questions for y'all.

In reality I think they would have to go to a lump sum system. This is because the US finally finished paying widows benefits from the americal civil war in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Janeway

Add prolong to the mix and you could be looking at a close to millenium commitment.

Don't see any problem with benefits for dependent children, cutting off when they could no longer reasonably expect to be dependent on their deceased parent. With 'modern' medicine the numbers of permanently seriously disabled dependants are going to be tiny so they are a special case that can probably be accommodated. So, yes, for benefits for Helen till she graduated from the Academy. Lars and Berry were never dependants of Mrs Zilwicki, so no benefits for them.

ACW widow's pensions were conceived in days when women generally had much poorer educational opportunities than men and almost no way of earning a decent living, especially if they had young children, NTM that divorce was almost unknown. In the Honorverse none of those things hold, so I would be surprised if benefits for a surviving spouse hadn't been seriously re-thought.[/quote]
One of the benefits in U.S. military is if you receive (IIRC) a Silver Star or above your children receive an automatic appointment to one of the service academies. This probably what happened to Helen Zilwicki.

The whole issue is complex. First of all, it seems clear that people will be working far longer. Living to 200 and stopping work at 80 when you are in good health is ridiculous.

So I would guess pensions would be more like defined contribution things where you pay in certain money and it grows, you hope, rather than a defined pension.

The Civil War issue is a bit of a fake for now. A lot of old civil war vets married very young women for the usual variety of reasons. A lot of the Civil War vets were teens when they fought and some took very young brides when they were old. It was a way of taking care of friends' daughters. And those women lived for a very long time.

I would guess that things like that don't exist on Manticore. Most people seem to work. New limbs are grown. There has been no mention of cancer, stroke or Alzheimer's.

So people work. Taxes are very simple based on textev. Terekhov mused that it took almost no time. Chances are the government did not have a major social system of dependent people.

There might not be ANY life insurance companies as we know them.

kenl511 wrote:Conversation with my 85 year old mum, the question of Soldiers Group Life Insurance came up. What would service dependents' benefits look like in around 2000 years in the future?

Would Anton Zilwiki have gotten a lump sum pay out after his wife's death? Would he have collected an ongoing dependent's allowance for his daughter? Would the service have refused to add Berry and Lars to his late wife's dependent list for benefits purposes?

Just some silly questions for y'all.

Berry and Lars were not Helen Senior's dependents, so they would not be entitled to share any orphan's benefits the RMN offers. Our Helen (tm) would receive benefits until she reached 18, graduated university, or whatever age test was imposed on beneficiaries.