At 62, 25% of the poorest French men would have already died. This very striking figure is brandished by political leaders who deplore the social inequalities linked to the pension reform, such as Anne Hidalgo, socialist mayor of Paris, Clémence Guetté, deputy of La France insoumise (LFI) or Laurent Berger, secretary general of the CFDT. Where does this data come from and is it enough to illustrate the inequalities in the face of the increase in the retirement age?
These data come from a 2018 INSEE report on life expectancy by standard of living. They were taken up in December 2021 by an infographic by Liberation, which has since been widely shared on social networks, which emphasizes the fact that at age 62, 25% of French men who are among the poorest 5% are already dead, five times more than the richest 5%. This means that someone who has spent their entire life in the poorest 5% of the population has higher than average mortality and a one in four chance of dying before age 62. A proportion that even reaches 29% if we lower the legal retirement age to 64, as provided for by the government reform, calculated Liberation.
This INSEE data only captures the situation of men who remain in the “first twenty” of standard of living for their lifetime – the poorest 5% of the population. How many are there? The study does not specify. In a blog post, two economists, Ulysse Lojkine and Michaël Zemmour, qualify the scope of this figure, because many people alternate more or less austere and more or less austere periods during their lives, making them move in the twentieths. of income.
They also note that the 5% lowest monthly standard of living corresponds to an income of 466 euros per month. These people are often far from employment and have no, or very few, pension rights: the coming reform should not change anything in their most precarious situation.
It is also interesting to focus the debate on the temporality of this phenomenon. MM. Zemmour and Lojkine rely on additional data from Insee to demonstrate that “half of those who die before the age of 62 have already died before the age of 55”. In other words, the data used by Liberation gives no indication of the effect of raising the retirement age on the probability that the poorest can benefit from it.
Another limitation: this data only applies to men. What about women? At age 62, 13% of the poorest women have died compared to 3% of the wealthiest. A non-negligible difference, but less pronounced than in men.
Even if this data should be taken with caution, raising the retirement age would mechanically increase the proportion of workers who will die before reaching this age.
According to a note by Mr. Lojkine published on the HAL site, the reform planned by the government would increase pre-retirement mortality by 1.4 percentage points on average, with disparities according to living standards. For men aged 43 to 58, the bottom three quintiles (i.e. the lowest 60% of men) have a five times higher risk of dying before retirement age than the top two quintiles – a similar proportion can be observed for women. We would thus go on average from one risk in twenty to one risk in fifteen of dying before retirement.
Moreover, the pension reform in preparation would significantly increase the risk of short retirement. An increase mainly supported by the poorest because Lojkine concludes that an individual among the 40% of the poorest men “has a one in ten chance of dying before retirement, a one in five chance of having a very short retirement (five years or less) and a one in three chance of having a short retirement (ten years or less).
