Ask Archer: Does anyone really live to be 110 years old?

A reader asks: Is anyone really 110 years old?

Archer replies: Hindu Arabic numbers – the decimal based system with which we are all familiar – originated in India sometime in the sixth or seventh century, according to historians. The idea made its way to the Middle East and eventually to Europe. It took several centuries – II or III, or maybe V or VI as the Romans would have put it – to be adopted.

No doubt the introduction of the decimal based system was follow closely by the first decimal-based fraud. But, of course, there was fraud long before there was base ten. In fact, AI (Perplexity) tells us that the first recorded financial fraud occurred in 300 BCE in Greece. This involved a merchant taking out an insurance policy on his vessel in a practice known as “bottomry,” apparently an early form of asset-based lending with the ship and its cargo serving as collateral.

The merchant in question, Hegestratos, borrowed money to pay for a cargo of corn, repayable upon the successful completion of the voyage. Instead, he claimed falsely that the ship had sunk, allowing him to both sell the cargo and collect the insurance. Unfortunately for him, the fraud was discovered, and he is alleged to have drowned trying to escape (though who knows, there may have been an insurance angle there, too).

Now there is this, from a recent article from AFP (Agence France-Presse) entitled, “The secret to living to 110? Bad Record Keeping.”

This according to Saul Newman, a researcher at the University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies. The true secret to extreme longevity, he wrote, seems to be to "move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying."

By way of illustration the article cites the case of Japan’s Sogen Kato, thought at one point to be 111 years and the country’s oldest living citizen. But when welfare workers stopped by to wish him a "Otanjoubi Omedetou" (“happy birthday”) they found he had been dead for 30 years, as reported by the BBC. His family had been dining out on his pension checks for decades.

While Kato lived in Japan, an advanced nation, Newman found more generally that supercentenarians tended to come from areas with poor health, high levels of poverty, and bad or nonexistent record keeping – nothing was said about eating yogurt or running a daily marathon accompanied by a donkey.

Investors, of course, are all too aware of the ability of numbers to mislead. There is what you might call the magic of reification to contend with: putting a number in a spreadsheet makes it appear more real. But of course it isn’t. Whether it’s the Fed’s dot plot or the latest earnings release from Enron, there is often less than there appears.

A useful rule of thumb: when something looks too good to be true, further digging is often warranted, either through the numbers or in the backyard.

Woof!