Life tables

Edward Higgs

Life tables describe the extent to which a group of people born at the same time (i.e. a life table cohort) dies off with age. In simple terms, a life table might be constructed to show the number of children born at a particular date who were alive at one year, ten years, 60 years, and so one. This could then be used to predict how many children born at a particular date would be alive in ten years time, and life expectancies more generally. But life tables can show life expectancies for people at any age. Since rates of mortality change over time and differ between groups within a population, the figures given in life tables differ depending on the date they start, the society they relate to, or the sub-group within that society.

Life tables in the modern sense began with the work of John Graunt in London in the 1660s, who used the London bills of mortality to create simple tables. The life table was subsequently developed by others, such as Edmund Halley and Richard Price, and became an invaluable tool for insurance companies. The latter needed to have accurate life tables to ensure that the premiums they charged their customers for life insurance would cover the cost of the money they paid out to beneficiaries (Lewin and De Valois, 83–90). Many friendly societies and commercial insurance companies went bankrupt in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because they lacked suitable actuarial tables. The desire to produce accurate actuarial aids lay behind much of the early history of statistical production within the General Register Office (GRO), based on the vital registration data collected under the 1836 Registration Act (Higgs, 22–34).

William Farr, the GRO's principle statistician and superintendent of statistics from 1842 to 1880, produced a number of such life tables in the Annual Reports of the Registrar General (ARRG). He also worked as an actuarial consultant to other public and private bodies. Farr's first English Life Table appeared in the Fifth and Sixth ARRGs, based on civil registration data for the census year 1841 (Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General (1841), xii-xxxv, 161–78; Sixth Annual Report of the Registrar General (1842), 290–358). English Life Table Number Two appeared for each sex separately in the Twelfth and Twentieth ARRGs, based on the census of 1841 and from death registration for the years 1838 to 1844. His most important life table, Number Three, using data from the censuses of 1841 and 1851, and death registration for 1838 to 1854, was published as a separate volume, entitled English Life Table, Tables of Lifetimes, Annuities and Premiums, in 1864 (Eyler, 66–80).

Farr's successor, William Ogle, produced a new English Life Table in the Supplement to the Forty-fifth ARRG in 1885, based on death registration data for 1871 to 1880 (vi-ix). The Supplement, produced every ten years to look at mortality trends over a particular decade, now became the main vehicle for the publication of life tables. Ogle followed up his first effort with another national life table in 1895, based on the death data for 1881 to 90 (Supplement to the Registrar General's Fifty-fifth Annual Report. Pt.I ). The GRO produced another extensive set of life tables, its sixth, in the Supplement to the Sixty-fifth ARRG, Part 1 in 1905, covering 1891 to 1900 (xv-lxiii). The next Supplement volumes produced English Life Tables Number 7 and 8, covering the years 1901 to 1910, and 1910 to 1912 respectively (Supplement to the Registrar General's Seventy-fifth Annual Report. Part I; Supplement to the Registrar General's Seventy-fifth Annual Report. Part II).

Despite this considerable effort, it cannot be said that the GRO's life tables were a great commercial success. Life tables for the whole population were not very helpful for working-class friendly societies or middle-class insurance companies that insured only part of the population. Also, these bodies had an alternative source of official actuarial advice in the Registry of Friendly Societies (Higgs, 34–40). But from the GRO's point of view, its life tables were still important as a means of showing improvements in life expectancy over time, or the difference in life expectancy between healthy rural areas and the insanitary cities (Eyler, 80–90). By the early twentieth century, however, the GRO's expertise in the production of life tables was not exactly cutting edge, and the tables it published after the Edwardian period were the work of outside actuaries, or of the Government Actuaries Department (Higgs, 182–3).

REFERENCES

Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841) BPP 1843 XXI. (516) [View this document: Fifth annual report of the registrar-general]

Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics: civil registration, censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837–1952 (Hatfield, 2004).

Christopher Lewin and Margaret de Valois, 'History of actuarial tables' in Martin Campbell Kelly, Mary Croarkin, John Fauvel and Raymond Flood, eds, From Sumer to the spreadsheets: the curious history of tables (Oxford, 2003), 79–104.

Sixth annual report of the Registrar General (1842), BPP 1844 XIX (540). [View this document: Sixth annual report of the registrar-general]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Forty-fifth Annual Report, BPP 1884–85 XVII (C.4564). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's forty-fifth annual report]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Fifty-fifth Annual Report. Pt.I, BPP 1895 XXIII Pt.I (C.7769). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's fifty-fifth annual report. Pt.I]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Sixty-fifth Annual Report. Part I, BPP 1905 XVIII (Cd. 2618). [View this document: Decennial supplement to registrar-general's sixty-fifth annual report [Part I]]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Seventy-fifth Annual Report. Part I: Life Tables, BPP 1914 XIV (Cd.7512). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's seventy-fifth annual report. Part I: Life tables]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Seventy-fifth Annual Report. Part II: Abridged Life Tables, BPP 1920 X (Cmd. 1010). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's seventy-fifth annual report. Part II: Abridged life tables]