Jay Jackson
Chairman & CEO
Dr. Jay Olshansky joined us at Investor Day to talk about something most people have never heard of — the Gompertz Law of Mortality. It’s a formula from 1825 that describes how human risk of death increases over time, with the basic premise that your risk of death doubles roughly every seven to eight years.
It’s one of the most famous prediction tools in public health and epidemiology, validated across scientific disciplines for two centuries. And as you may imagine, this type of time-tested theory around mortality is something we at Abacus have been interested in assessing against our own data.
Testing Against History
In one graph, Dr. Jay demonstrates that the data we use to calculate life expectancy isn’t a guesstimate or something based purely on averages. Our life expectancy data follows a 200-year-old law of mortality. In other words, the very foundation of our new infrastructure, LifeARC, is actually not new at all. It’s rooted in fundamental biology, with 20 years of comprehensive, individualized data proving it works.
From Population to Person
LifeARC determines where you sit on that distribution. It uses medical history, health conditions, genetics, lifestyle—all the individual details that move you closer to one side or the other.
What’s more, is that The Gompertz Law has proved consistent across subpopulations. Wealthier, more educated individuals cluster together with longer life expectancies while people with serious health conditions cluster where there are shorter life expectancies.
Ultimately, nobody can predict down to the minute exactly how long someone will live. But armed with our robust data, LifeARC can predict which distribution they belong to. And when it comes to planning for the future, that nuance can make all the difference.