Health and Retirement study indicates people wildly underestimate how long they will live
(Phys.org) —The University of Michigan conducted a poll back in 1992, asking 26,000 men and women over the age of 50 and living in the U.S. what they thought about their chances of living to age 75, was it 10 percent, 50, 100? It was all part of a Health and Retirement survey conducted to shed some light on what people were doing about saving for retirement in light of news that social security might not be the safety net many people have been hoping for. Now, 22 years later, researchers with the Brookings Institute have revisited the answers given by respondents and compared those numbers to how long those people actually did live—to see how well the people back then were able to guess how long they would live. As it turns out, most were wildly pessimistic.