Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 23 October 2026 – The financial lobby tells us ad nauseum that we are all living longer, and that – if not already retired – we had better all save like crazy. (Note, by the way, that the cost of retirement is the resources that go into supporting retired people whether their money comes from a pension or from drawing down private savings. The biggest ‘burden’ is a country’s affluent retired, who draw resources away from everyone else.)
The other day I saw this on YouTube: Why Australians were so thin in the 1970s. The people shown would have been born between 1930 and 1955. One reason for ‘thinness’ not mentioned in the video is that people smoked more then; but Australasians born between 1930 and 1955 probably did not smoke as much as those who served in the world wars.
Putting the smoking issue aside, we note that the high life expectancy statistics for Australians and New Zealanders for the last fifteen years relate to the death rates of the people depicted in that video.
We know that people of subsequent generations have been more prone to obesity, and to type-two diabetes. I note from my own experience in 1976 (the only time that I was in the United States) that I was constantly aware that that country had a significant obesity problem compared to the countries I was familiar with (then, I was familiar with New Zealand, United Kingdom, and West Europe). And I note that official life expectancy in the United States today is three years less than New Zealand; and four years less than Australia.
One important but understated statistic from the Covid19 pandemic was the significant increased risk of death, worldwide, of people with diabetes comorbidity.
I heard this on RNZ this morning: Porirua research highlights scale of type 2 diabetes epidemic. We may add there is almost certainly a mental health epidemic which impacts on the same demographic discussed in that radio report; and which may to some extent be caused by poor physical health.
If we combine this very evident prime-age health deterioration with the Easterlin demographic hypothesis (which explains why relatively over-populated generations face worse life outcomes due to higher competition from both peers and the preceding generation) we can only conclude that people born between 1960 and 1975, and also people born between 1985 and 2000 are likely to die on average at significantly lower ages than people born in the 1930s and 1940s.
New Zealand has a particularly large demographic spike of ‘millennials’; ‘baby-blippers’ born between 1987 and 1997, augmented by immigration. The generation born from 1960 to 1975 is also very ‘numerically abundant’.
New Zealand’s healthcare system is today facing a substantially increased number of people in their seventies and eighties. But these are relatively healthy people. And who, in large part, have substantial capacity to spend on private healthcare. These represent a primary ‘concertina’, or compression of demand.
What New Zealand is facing is a demographic concertina effect – a concertina effect of morbidity which will lead to increased premature mortality – whereby people currently aged 50 to 65 (and there are many of them) are already placing unexpectedly high demands on New Zealand’s health care system; significantly higher than would be predicted by past age-specific death rates.
But that’s still only the third of it. A third compression is coming from those born either side of 1990; people in their thirties and early forties today who represent a significant demographic spike. The healthiest of these are our many overseas-born residents who were born around 1990. I fear that our New Zealand-born ‘millennial’ population – born in the late 1980s and early 1990s – will prove to be very much at the wrong end of this concertina.
The life expectancy statistics which we rely on are derived from past mortality, especially from people who were young in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the concept of life expectancy is a conceptualisation of the future. We have no idea how long today’s younger people will live for. But there are some very worrying portents; today’s 35 year-olds missed out in the infectious diseases which centuries-ago took many young people. Rather they await onset of the more chronic conditions of twenty-first century middle-age; many are not in good shape to meet these challenges.
Too many peak-age adults – alive today – experience sedentary work and commuting, inadequate incomes, quality-compromised and barely affordable housing, private debt, time poverty, social isolation, and unhealthy imported diets. We have more varieties of foods available to us today; though the predominant experience is more food, much of it very fast. Quantity trumps quality; the reckoning is only starting to show in our healthcare and end-of-life statistics.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.