Its a boring long term investment. But would it not be true that companies that aren't too involved in annuities or pensions where they want you to die, are going to benefit from the almost certain fact that life expectancy is apt to go way up while premiums will not lower proportionally as they are based on past results. And might that be even more true for companies in less developed countries?

its a huge bull market , and even underwriters like PRU , MET , LNC , LFC have been hitting all time highs this week , in spite of this industry being moreso for its yields. its already known that life expectancy is going higher and higher (especially in 2nd world countries), so not to say its efficient market theory , but its already being baked into their future earnings /lower term life premiums.

Generally people in poor countries have a more healthy weight. Then when they get richer, more people become overweight due to junk food being cheaper etc. Isn't obesity the biggest health threat? Have you ever seen a fat 85 year old?

I think average age is generally lower mostly because of higher child mortality?

Also cost of finding new pharmaceutical molecules has been steadily going up, and inequality has been going up as well. Then there are people who think a large percentage of the population will be left behind by automation. So life insurance for lower income demographics can (sadly) be quite profitable in that case. Even if some healthy rich people live to be a 140 years old.

Saw somewhere recently where average age for lower classes in developed countries is actually declining as well.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38247385

very interesting idea esp. beyond the very major countries.

is it people living a long time OR people dying less in the prime earning years - also when they have dependent kids? i realize quantitatively they are correlated but not the same thing.

No, because pricing of longevity is based on future expectations including an assumption about future mortality improvements. If an actuary needs to guess the post-age 65 longevity of a current 30 year old they don't just look at data for how long 65 year old people in 1980 have lived.

There's a few factors at play.

1. The people who are likely to live the longest aren't the ones buying life insurance.

2. Life insurance is sold cheaply with the assumption that many people will cancel their policy. So there's a burgeoning market in buying people's insurance policies and making their payments for them. It's the life settlement or viatical industry. Sick poor people now have someone to pay their life insurance bills for them, and in fact they have someone who will give them immediate cash to spend before they die.

3. The death rate of the 30 year man who buys life insurance for 20 years to cover his family while his kids are in school isn't likely to change much.

Most insurance policies aren't in force for decades and have been canceled long before people are 65+.

Emergent capital looks interesting. Trading at 1/3 book value.

but this has been occuring for 100 years. the people who work for these companies and price policies have only ever experienced increasing life expectancies in their lifetime. So its already built in to the way they think and price.

only edge here would be if you think there is an acceleration of in increase coming

some interesting comments......

i agree with the one person that life insurance has more to do with insuring 45 year high earning people for 10-15 years until they retire. and less to do with the fact that the average death age keeps increasing. i'm thinking alot of life insurance payouts would have to do with accidents which has little to do with medical breakthroughs (surviing accident has medical advancement aspect). cancer/heart attacks it would apply but i think higher longevity has alot more to do with more older people living longer than previous generations.

life insurance companies i'm aware of have alot to do with annuities where the argument is the complete opposite. people living longer is bad for insurance co's selling annuities based on historical tables.

ties into my final points

.... i think life insurance co's have a pretty good business moat (thank you morningstar). people want large safe companies. it's something very important to customer so they won't go with some fast talking person offering them amazing deal. it's very complex so price discounting is difficult to attain advantage and you can hide a ton of margin there.

lastly, life insurance co's have the perfect argument for each customer. they pull out historical mortality charts for the life insurance clients. they pull out studies about the future for annuity clients. so they can work a marketing arbitrage between life ins and annuity customers.. sort of like gasoline retailers who are quicker to raise prices than lower them (there have been studies about this. 4 weeks vs. 7 weeks or something like that)

Once again and for the record in case any readers are getting persuaded by this incorrect argument: no insurance companies are selling annuities based on historical tables. They are all assuming that a person buying an annuity today is going to experience future mortality improvements in line with, or even exceeding, past mortality improvement trends. It is a gigantic fallacy to assume that insurance companies have not noticed that longevity has improved over time. They know.

perhaps next time you could actual read and post my entire comment rather than one clause of it.

i apologize in advance if you actually are as stupid as you come across on here... it must be rough.

Settle down. I'm not saying that it's an argument you're making, I'm saying it's an argument one might infer from the discussion in this thread (in part because it's asserted without support in the OP).