STATS – April 2018 – Actuarial Evaluation of President of the Church

UPDATE 3/31/2018: I have included Elder Gerrit W. Gong and Elder Ulisses Soares to the simulation. I also updated Elder Bednar's mortality improvement adjustments to match the younger apostles. Elder Soares is relatively young for a newly called apostle at age 59. Watching him over the next decade will be interesting. The outputs below have been updated to reflect these changes.

These projections are my playful forecast of how the presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might succeed each other in the future. As I have outlined in past posts, outside of the Godhead, the hierarchy of the Church is lead by 15 apostles, the most senior apostle being the president. These apostles are ranked in order of seniority. The person who has been the apostle the longest is the president. When the current president passes, the next most senior apostle becomes president. Note, that succession is by seniority (not by age), but, moving up in seniority is tied to death, which is correlated with age. So, age gives us information on who is likely to live long enough to become president. This process provides God a whole lot of variance within future lifetimes to work with. If He wants you as president of the Church, you will live long enough to get there. To learn more, you can visit www.lds.org.

The projections below show, over time, the probability of which apostle will have survived to be president during that year on average. The table below that shows the aggregate chance of being president along with other model outputs. Placeholder assumptions were used for apostles not yet called.

Actuaries are statisticians that specialize in risk management. Usually, you will find actuaries working in the insurance industry, like life insurance, which deals with the probability of death. Life insurance actuaries use tools called life tables to calculate mortality probabilities. Using a modified life table from the Society of Actuaries and deploying similar techniques as life insurance actuaries, I wrote a simulation that looks at the expected life spans of the apostles and how it affects the probability of them surviving to be the president of the Church. The simulation was written in the R language and has changed little in methodology over the past few years that I have done these forecasts.