Managing Longevity Risks and Opportunities

Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, and he teaches a great class about death – PHIL 176: Death. You don’t need to have high SAT scores in order to attend this class, nor do you need to reside in Connecticut. Using the power of the Internet, anyone on this planet can attend his course at any time. It’s freely available online. In lecture 17 of the series, he talks about why death is considered to be so bad, which helps explain the appeal of longevity. Aging has always been the ultimate evil, unless Dr. Kagan can convince you otherwise (he gives it a pretty good go in his lecture series). According to experts like Margaretta Colangelo, longevity also represents the investment opportunity of a lifetime. And she’s not the only one that thinks that.

“Longevity is the economic opportunity of our lifetime” Andy Sieg, president of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

Aging Analytics Agency published an 83-page report which talks about the financial implications of longevity for all the various stakeholders in the financial industry, from insurance companies to asset management firms. For example, asset managers need to make it easier for investors to invest smaller amounts in order to increase diversification.

Seems like they’ve listened, as all t