In another example of vital statistics being grossly distorted by a combination of poor record keeping and possibly people with a selfish agenda, it is being reported in the Guardian and elsewhere that possibly hundreds of thousands of people over age 100 in Japan are actually dead, but unreported. Investigations are now underway to determine how much of this problem is due to record keeping problems and how much to family members failing to report the deaths of their elderly relatives in order to continue to collect their pension benefits by fraudulent means.
There are more than 77,000 Japanese citizens reported to be over age 120, and even 884 persons AGED OVER 150 YEARS OF AGE, who are still alive according to government rolls.
While we in the US wouldn’t bat an eye if we heard this story coming out of the Chicago area of Cook County, Illinois, given the number of dead people still actively voting in elections there, there are at least 230,000 people in Japan over age 100 who simply cannot be located by any means. This large centenarian population is largely responsible for the very high average life expectancy in Japan (currently listed by the World Bank as 82.6 years, more than four years greater than the US average of 78.4 years (this is including dead voters in Chicago)), as well as any senior citizens under 100 who are actually dead but have not been reported as such on government records.
NOTE: Even if persons over 100 aren’t counted in life expectancy statistics, as is claimed later in the article, the problem doesn’t just begin at age 100, it is clear that whatever problems are at the root of these errors, they extend to a large number of people below age 100 who are also dead but are listed as alive on government records.
This distortion in Japan’s real average life expectancy is a great example of how a large body of statistics can be spoiled by poor record keeping or outright fraud.
Where this becomes problematic for us in the US is that Japan’s high life expectancy has been repeatedly used by the left as “facts” to support their demands for universal health care as well as various changes in the dietary, smoking, and exercise habits of Americans, frequently associated with proposals for large amounts of government regulation and taxation of the lives of private citizens and regulation and banning of various legal products (soda pop, breakfast cereals, beef, etc). We should look on the exposure of this statistical error as an object lesson we can apply to other public policy issues that so-called scientists attempt to promote ‘solutions’ to problems that they claim exist, based on faulty facts.
Benjamin Franklin —-“There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”——- Of course, they give as good as the get.
Mods, my last post went to the nether world again. 🙁 I tried about 3 times to post it, but it just wasn’t going to. If you do retrieve, please only once. Thanx.
Doubting Thomas says:
September 13, 2010 at 5:50 pm
“Doesn’t the current plan force poor people (and young people are are usually poorer) to buy health insurance from for-profit insurance providers?”
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Yes. While I see the “problems” differently than you, I can tell you as a formerly young and poor person, there is no way I could have made it if I were forced into buy insurance I knew wouldn’t be used. Healthy young adults simply don’t use the health care system.(Which is why we forced them to contribute.) In this particular case, the poor, or their employers will be
punishedforced to subsidize an industry that they themselves will find of little necessity. This is reminiscent of when my fairly wealthy uncle used to state that the cap on social security of $50/year. He paid that towards the end of his working career. He used to boast that it was the best investment he ever made. As he laughed about me working to pay his bills. lol, the old boy has a sense of humor after a few belts.Anthony: Here’s example of how endemic scientific fraud is. Maybe those guys at CRU really weren’t violating accepted norms of scientific practice.
http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/corporate-news/118359-study-scientific-journal-contributors-hiding-corporate-ties
The article mentions Dr. Scott Reuben … it fails to mention that his cooked up “research” probably resulted in tens of thousands of premature deaths. Some have referred to Reuben as a medical Madoff but the comparison is unfair; there is no evidence that Madoff killed thousands.
Madoff will spend the rest of his life in jail, Reuben got six months.
Americans are being killed for profit.
dT
John A says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:17 am
Actually the real quote is
No single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood, and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity.”
I am willing to bet CAGW comes close.
I am reminded that in my town the “Equal Rights for the Undead” party stood in the recent general election (I kid you not).
John A says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:17 am
Actually the real quote is
No single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood, and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity.”
I am willing to bet CAGW comes close.
I am reminded that the “Equal Rights for the Undead” party stood in my town for the recent general election (I kid you not)
MOD…
My comments are disappearing
Can you fool a census taker? Ever see the movie Waking Ned Divine? Its about someone who wins the lottery and then dies. The whole town is involved in fooling the inspectors into believing that Ned is still alive so that the town can share the winnings.
“Is it really possible that every household in Japan was visited in order to collate census data, and that all citizens were required to be present when the census taker called? Were the sick dragged out of hospital to attend, holidays cancelled, business trips curtailed ………..”
As a 30-year resident of Japan who has lived in the countryside and the city, I can personally report that a census taker (usually a local resident volunteer) normally comes to the front door and personally hands over a census form to the householder, who is asked to fill it in over the course of the next few days, after which the census taker returns and collects it. The census taker may give advice in order to help the householder to provide accurate information, but is under no obligation to confirm the accuracy of the information provided by the householder. It is a matter of trust.
The national census only takes place once a decade, but there are other ways of potentially checking on the numbers of people living in various households. For instance, local authorities keep records for tax and other administrative purposes. Also the police (who are invariably friendly and never taser householders or shoot their pet dogs) keep records who lives where and periodically (about once every 2 to 5 years) call to ask specifically whether their lists are up to date. (This practice used to be almost universal but it seems to be less common these days in the big cities where there are more single-person households, homes where nobody is home, and people tend to move from place to place more frequently.)
In theory, it should be possible to cross-reference different sets of records to spot discrepancies, but this takes us into the quagmire of working out how far “personal” information should be shared.
I don’t know for sure how many of those “230,000 people in Japan over age 100 who simply cannot be located by any means” are counted in the annual national population figures. Common sense tells me that the bulk of them have been registered as dead somewhere but that local authorities have neglected to cross them off certain lists of living people. Undoubtedly there are going to a certain number of cases where people have failed to report the deaths of elderly relatives in order to keep the national pension payments coming in. Personally I would be surprised if there turned out to be more than a few hundred such cases nationwide, but we’ll see.
It is interesting that within Japan, semitropical Okinawa is the prefecture with the longest average lifespan, while the prefectures where people have a shorter life expectancy are those with huge conurbations and those that have have cold winters plus heavy snow. On the face of it, these stats are a global warming alarmist’s nightmare.
“The government said the findings would have a minimal impact on longevity figures, which are based on census data collated during home visits.”
Home visits from census workers? So I “borrow” someone’s elderly aunt from down the street, who is mostly blind and deaf, probably about 83 years old, and show her off as my great-grandmother who is 123 years old. Paperwork? I have my great-grandmother’s birth certificate, and in America, a social security number. A woman who is 123 years old will not have a driver’s license. After the census worker leaves, I return the good old lady to her proper family, along with some small token of appreciation consisting of numerous dead presidents.
Haven’t any of you gone through an audit at work? Show people what they expect to see, and that is what they will see. Anyone who is conducting an audit or census is under time constraints, and wants to spend as little time as possible at any particular household. Unless they are fingerprinting the elderly, how do they know which elderly person they actually have in front of them?
but then like Francisco Franco
Strange no one makes that joke about Tito. Even more authoritarian than Franco. Same lingering death scene. Died right around the same time. But no one ever made that joke about Tito. I wonder why that is. (NOT!)
I don’t know why people obsess about such trivia.
Well, mainly because it gives rise to such idiotic, peabrained notions as, say, that Cuba has better healthcare than the US. (To pick a wild example.)
And such flatheaded delusions lead us into mindbendingly stupid, destructive policies as a result.
This is terribly off-topic, but doesn’t it seem interesting that Fidel Castro is espousing democracy at this particular time? Perhaps general elections will be held, and he will, all so conveniently, be found to have died in his sleep soon after the election results are in.
I mention this to balance out the dead voters in Illinois. Perhaps there are some dead leaders, too.
And I think I can safely predict that there will be no jokes whatever on SNL to the effect of, “Fidel Castro is still dead.”
> MikeN says:
> JDN, If they’re using the median, then you have to remove that 3% and go that far > down the median line.
I agree that there could be cheating. I don’t know what measure they are using. Someone is claiming they aren’t using the 100+ persons in the calculation, which seems odd. But since I’m no expert on Japanese demographics, I was hoping someone would link to reliable data before everyone jumps on this issue.
The Japanese are usually held up as having less cancer, dementia, diabetes, etc. … i.e., the expensive diseases of aging. As such, life expectancy is not as important since everyone in the first world lives about as long as everyone else. For example, the U.S. has ~8% rate of diabetes: http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/ compared to ~5% for Japan, with a slightly older population. Japan has far lower obesity: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity. Japan is usually held up as an example of low salt diets resulting in less high blood pressure. Also, less breast cancer in Japan (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_bre_can_inc-health-breast-cancer-incidence) and cancer in general. I can’t find links to all these statistics. I’m actually shocked that I can’t find them, and, the WHO report is useless for diseases of rich countries, like old age, cancer, over-eating, etc. 🙂 So, my point is that we shoudn’t make snide comments about Japan’s life expectancy without some context.
mikelorrey says:
September 13, 2010 at 4:52 pm
For those attacking my post as a “partisan political ad”, for the record, I am NOT a Republican. …
For those on the left who took objection either to my painting them as centrally to blame for policies that rely on these faulty statistics, I think my assertion is borne out by the record [snip]
Mike: The left is not monolithic. Some of us are for gun rights (See http://democratsforgunownership.org/), ending military adventures, strong domestic energy production (not solar or wind), strong accounting in government spending, etc. I feel the Republicans pay lip service to these things. How would you like it if I blamed you for all the things Rush Limbaugh says? I’m certain he will back you in your attack on national health care.
evanmjones says:
September 13, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Spot on Evan!
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JDN says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:29 pm
So, my point is that we shoudn’t make snide comments about Japan’s life expectancy without some context.
JDN, it isn’t snide to point out what we’ve been told over and over again to a point of monotony, may be in error, and that it isn’t easily detected about what is fact and what is hyperbole. The fact is, I’ll keep my foods and lifestyle over a preference of imagined couple of years more longevity. But, upon further review, it may be that my lifestyle and foods are not costing me longevity at all, but rather I may just be a different statistical view. I’ve got half of it though, my alcohol and nicotine intake can match most!
Stastics are about what they want to find. When my mother died, while filling out the death certificate, I was asked if she EVER smoked. Well, yes she did, for about 15 years of her 82 years. At her doctor’s recommendation to calm her nerves. She died from dementia. Her brief smoking did not lead to her death, but you can be sure that her death was reported as a “smoking related illness”. She also ate carrots, drove without a seat belt and occasionaly voted Democrat but no one asked me those questions.
Perhaps the Japanese Census actually sights and checks for vital signs each person it counts but I can assure you that the U.S. Census didn’t. Two thirds of the census count was based on mail in forms and the remaining one third was based on interviews by phone or in person with one member of each household, or with a neighbor when a household member couldn’t be reached within 6 tries (3 phone and 3 door knocks).
Someone capable of forging great granddad’s signature on a pension check (certainly a crime) is surely capable of lying to the census taker about the old dude being asleep in an upstairs bedroom.
Well great. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this bloody green tea and fish?
Rick says:
September 13, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Well great. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this bloody green tea and fish?
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See that’s where you went wrong. I went with the cigarettes and sake, so I’m good!
The longevity scandal in Japan is funny. But, the news below (sorry, it’s written in Japanese) may be more relevant to the main interest of the readers of this site than the longevity of Japanese people.
http://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/local/article/20100907000025
It shows that the temperature 39.9 degC which was reported recently in Kyo-tanabe city seems to be a result of a thermometer covered with a kind of ivy. The picture tells by itself although it is not easy to identify where the thermometer is: somewhere under the plant, near the hand of the man standing by a utility pole. I doubt that a utility pole is a suitable place to set a thermometer because the utility pole would work as a heat source.
This thermometer in Kyo-tanabe city is a part of AMeDAS (Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System) which belongs to Japanese Meteorological Office.
If this is due to fraud it is the tip of the iceberg. They should be going through all the people with pensions. checking they are alive.
In Greece, where we are having economic problems due to the hugely expanded civil service section, they are going through the pensioners with a fine comb.
They find fraud in a large percentage of the cases ,200.000 in a total of 2.600.000 pensioners, and we are a country of 10.000.000. ( in greek). . In a statistical check of 500 of over 100 year old pensioners, 321 were dead.
A large number may be for people who have died and their relatives keep on receiving the pension. Since death and birth records are still partly on paper, until everything is computerized it will be hard to tell, except by demanding that all power of representation is removed and the pensioner has to appear before getting the pension.
I do not think longevity records are compromised, because they are taken from different bases, not pensioners. These “alive” dead have been buried which means that a death certificate exists. The relatives did not hand in the proper pension papers but kept drawing the money from the bank account. They have even found bank accounts full where nobody is drawing the money. It is a matter of bad bookkeeping.
My post disappeared. Is f r a u d also on the spam catcher?
[REPLY – Yes. But if it’s in spam it’s not lost and will be reviewed. Sometimes when we consider a post to be borderline, we’ll toss it into spam for the other mods to check out. (And sure enough, another mod has retrieved it!) ~ Evan]
One of the other problems with working out a Japanese age from the date of birth, is that instead of using the Julian calendar, they use Emperor era dates. In this system, the year of a childs birth is counted from the year of that emperors birth. These era’s in reverse order are:
Heisei – 1989
Showa – 1926
Taishou – 1912
Weiji – 1868
What all this means, is that a child born, say on 25th May 1914 will have the date of birth of T03525 as the format is Era, year of era, month, day. Moreover, the era can be replaced by a sequence number, that counts Weiji as 1 and Heisei as 4, so the same date could be written as 203525. This could account for a lot of the mixups.
Many years ago, I remember reading about a similar thing in the Caucasus region of old Soviet Union. In order to avoid conscription, young men would ‘steal’ the identities of their deceased grandfathers, whose deaths had not been reported to the authorities. In a way, it was a win-win situation. By looking the other way, the government could promote a mythology about extreme longevity in that part of their country, and take credit for it. They even claimed that one of their citizens had reached the ripe old age of 158.
Of course, the documented longevity prize goes to Jeanne Calment, of France, who died at the age of 122. BTW, Calment ate a kilogram of chocolate per week for most of her adult life.