Letters | 11 January 2018

Long lives and pension pots

Sir: Jon Moynihan is too optimistic about the prospects for further increasing life expectancy, and too gloomy about those of the pensions industry (‘Falling Short’, 6 January). The wondrous advancements of medical science have offered little to solve the most pervasive problem we now face: declining mental health. It seems unlikely that society will chose to invest endlessly in repairing bodies to extend lifespans, when the minds relating to those bodies have already been lost.

So the viability of pension providers is not as parlous as suggested. Indeed, many current fund deficits derive from the low investment yield environment that central bankers have engineered but which is not sustainable in the long term — the timeframe in which pension funds measure their liabilities. When more normal investment conditions return, the actuarial assumptions used in funding those liabilities (and they are always just assumptions) will greatly enhance the viability of pension provision.

The suggestion that the young can look forward to perhaps 50 years of drawing a pension looks more fanciful than the possibility that in a few years many pension funds will be reporting healthy surpluses.
Clive Thursby

Hindhead, Surrey

Robot nurses

Sir: Jon Moynihan is right to warn about the looming funding crisis of public-sector pensions. But one wonders why his optimism about future advances in longevity doesn’t also lead him to expect widespread productivity gains from automation. Much of state employment today involves routine administrative tasks that could be taken over by robots in the foreseeable future. Even medical diagnostics and some police and nursing functions could be more efficiently performed by artificial intelligence. Not only will robots make us richer and healthier, but they won’t require support in their old age.
Diego Zuluaga

Head of Financial Services and Tech Policy,

Institute of Economic Affairs, London SW1

Owen’s powerful poetry

Sir: How depressing to read Nigel Jones’s article about Wilfred Owen (‘Anthem for groomed youth’, 6 January).