OF NOTE

Gabe Walsh

The Saint Paul Area Association of Realtors announced the hire of Chief Executive Officer Gabriel (Gabe) Walsh. Walsh previously worked as an attorney at a law firm in Des Moines, Iowa, and was Iowa Association of Realtors general counsel.

AIRPORTS

The Metropolitan Airports Commission announced it has selected Mark Watczak as fire chief for Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Watczak has experience as a firefighter in both civilian and military roles. The MAC owns and operates the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and six suburban reliever airports in the Twin Cities.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Land Bank Twin Cities, a St. Paul-based nonprofit housing lender focused on underserved communities, announced the appointment of Aarica L. Coleman as president and CEO. Coleman recently served as administrator of the Bloomington Housing and Redevelopment Authority. … Market Bancorporation, the holding company for New Market Bank and Market Financial, Elko New Market, Minn., announced the launch of title insurance arm Market Title, led by Jim Milinkovich. Milinkovich most recently was operations director for The Title Team.

HONORS

Medica, a Minnetonka-based health insurer, announced it has received two Telly Awards for a video that focuses on the mental health journey of one of its executives, Chief Information and Operating Officer Dan Abdul. Telly Awards honor excellence in video and television production.

LAW

Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, St. Paul, announced the following staff appointments: staff attorneys Mary Tran, Eric Quintana-Snyder,  Abigail Adkins and Samantha (Mana) Kleiser; Antonia Cristofaro-Hark, paralegal; Angela Yang, accountant; intake specialists Aye Win and Mai See Xiong. … Maslon, Minneapolis, announced the addition of real estate finance attorney Jill Petrovic. Petrovic is a law school graduate of the University of St. Thomas, where she founded the Real Estate Law Association and participated in the law school’s bankruptcy litigation clinic and personal bankruptcy clinic. … Lathrop GPM announced that partner Laurie Huotari has rejoined the firm’s Business Transactions Practice Group in Minneapolis. Huotari joins from Stoel Rives where she served as Minneapolis office managing partner.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Envoy Medical, a White Bear Lake-based maker of hearing aids and similar technology, announced the appointment of Michael Crowe to its board of directors. Crowe is senior vice president of operations for Bioventus.

MILESTONES

MSS, a St. Paul-based metrowide nonprofit supporting adults with disabilities, announced it is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.

ORGANIZATIONS

The Twin Cities Chapter of the National Investor Relations Institute announced the election of its officers and directors for the 2024-25 program year: Co-Presidents Bernadette McCormick and Sam Gibbons; Advocacy Ambassador Brandon Elliott; Marketing Chair Peggy James; Membership Chair McCormick; Programs Co-Chairs Justin Horstman and Jeff Huebschen; Special Events Lori Lauber; Sponsorship Co-Chairs Gibbons and Adam Fee; Treasurer Darin Norman; At-Large Directors Mollie O’Brien, Josh Klaetsch and Bill Seymour.

REAL ESTATE

Kraus-Anderson Realty, Minneapolis, announced the promotion of Dave Stalsberg to director of leasing, acquisitions and dispositions. Stalsberg joined KA Realty in 2007 as a senior associate and has served as leasing manager since 2018.

SPORTS

The Minnesota Wild NHL hockey team announced Mike Snee has been hired as vice president of the Minnesota Wild Foundation and community relations, a newly created position. Snee was one of the original staff hires in 1998, is a longtime member of the USA Hockey Congress and serves on the boards of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame and the Minneapolis Youth Hockey Association.

TRAVEL

John Hall’s Alaska, a Lake City, Minn.-based operator of Alaska motorcoach tours, announced the following promotions and hires: Catherine Zulkifli and Jenny Johnson promoted to vice president positions; Rebecca Fernandez hired for the partnership management and guest operations team, and Adam Schimbeno transitions to a full-time position on the Motorcoach and Charter Operations team.

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Edward Lotterman

How do you know not to hire a particular financial planner? Well, if they write about Social Security that “when they started the program the average age of death was 65 — and the average person never collected Social Security,” you need to run. Fast!

But the preposterous idea is common enough that it got published and then picked up on a usually-wrong financial website.

Still, as phrased, it is not as imbecilic as Ultimate Fighting Championship “color commentator” and podcaster Joe Rogan, who calls Social Security “Franklin Roosevelt’s little scam, because nobody would get it.”

The best one can say about ignorance like this is German writer Friedrich Schiller’s observation that, “Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.”

But the belief that hardly anyone got Social Security benefits at first is widespread. It is based on a near-universal misunderstanding of “life expectancy,” which has a very specific definition. Yet failure to understand key details doesn’t excuse fatuous assertions that no “average American,” or even no one at all, got Social Security when it was established in 1935.

You don’t need highly developed critical thinking skills. Common sense should make it obvious.

So while it’s true that in 1935, “life expectancy at birth” was under 62 — lower than the retirement age of 65 in the Social Security Act — 7.8 million people over age 65 already were alive in our country. Were they somehow “abnormal?” Moreover, another 9.3 million were between 55 and 64. Were all doomed to death before getting benefits?

No, of course not! The general population back then had more common sense than now. They knew how many old people were living. They knew the rough odds of themselves eventually getting benefits. That is why the Social Security Bill was so overwhelmingly popular.

It was a Democratic party bill. Members of that party voted for it 284 to 15 in the House and 60 to 1 in the Senate. But Republicans also voted yea 81 to 15 in the House and 16 to 5 in the Senate. Such bi-partisanship was unusual back then. The GOP fought most of FDR’s proposals tooth and nail. But the electorate rightly understood that the bill would benefit a large number of them and wanted passage.

To get benefits, workers had to “contribute” over specified lengths of time. So when benefits were first paid, in 1940, only 222,000 people got checks. Yet that rose to 1.1 million by 1945, 2.93 million by 1950 and 7.56 million by 1955. Had these people somehow miraculously cheated death?

No, they hadn’t. Moreover, to comprehend these numbers, one must understand three facts.

First, a 1939 amendment added survivors, so that children and widows of qualifying workers got benefits. Secondly, most wives did not have earnings records or get benefits themselves. They did gain from their husbands’ benefits. So the number of individuals helped by the new program was substantially higher than the number of checks sent. Thirdly, farmers would not get included until 1955. In the mid-1940s they still made up nearly 30% of U.S. households. Government employees, railroad workers and ministers also were still out. So the number of beneficiaries was a substantially higher fraction of the worker groups covered by the Act than of their age group in the general population.

You don’t need a college degree to understand this. There were myriad old and aging people when the program started. Most rightly knew they or their families would benefit. Broad majorities in Congress supported it. These included anti-FDR Republicans who were not deluded about it not benefitting “average persons.”

My uncle who never got past eighth grade could have understood these simple facts in an instant.

The underlying problem is complex, however. Most people just don’t understand “life expectancy,” and perhaps the very label of this data set encourages this misunderstanding. A 2020 post on the Actuaries Digital website explains it perfectly:

“Life expectancy is a statistical calculation which estimates the average number of years individuals in a certain group will live. However, people seem to interpret it as an expert opinion that tells them exactly how long they can expect to live. This interpretation is dangerous and belies the wide range of lifespans for individuals within any group in practice.”

Succinctly, errors arise when people see an “average” without considering what it is, and how it is calculated. It is like being told “the average weight of high school students is 137 pounds” without considering differences between boys and girls or freshmen and seniors. No one would assume from this that every student weighs 137 pounds. We all know they don’t.

Same with average life expectancy. Yet millions hold contradictory beliefs: First, if the life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 77.5 years, people believe that they, themselves, can confidently plan on living to that age and arrange affairs accordingly. Second, people assume that the large majority of people will die near that age. Neither is true.

These things are true:

• The vast majority of people living when that metric was calculated will not die at that age. Some will die decades before 77.5 and others decades after.

• Most people live longer than the “life expectancy at birth” calculated in the year they were born.

• U.S. life expectancies have edged upwards for more than a century, with COVID as an aberration.

All good, but understand what is calculated and what the numbers mean.

The definition and calculations start with a “life table” for a given year that has the death rates for people at each year of age. What percentage of live births die in their first year? How many in the second year? The fifth? The 23rd? The 49th? The one tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and used by the Social Security Administration continues through the 119th year.

Now, with these “age-specific” death rates, begin with 100,000 births in a given year. How many will die in their first year? their second? and so on. When you get to a point where all are dead, figure out the weighted average age of deaths. That is the life expectancy of someone born that year if these death rates for each year remained frozen over time, until the last of the 100,000 babies dies. That obviously does not happen. Death rates, and so expectancies, at birth change.

Crucially, most of the improvement of life expectancies from 62 in 1935 to near 78 in 2021 came from reductions in death rates between birth to “adulthood.” The SSA sets that at age 21. Moreover, most of the improvements in that age range came at the early end, through reductions in “young child mortality” — deaths before the fifth birthday. Within that, the greatest improvement was in infants, birth to age 1.

Put another way, people in 1935, as in 2021, were likely to live long enough to collect Social Security if they simply made it through childhood. That fewer people are dying young as infants and young children remains the primary reason for longer expectancies over the last 90 years. Health improvements in adulthood add to that in greater survival into very old ages.

So, the financial adviser and podcaster Rogan all flub what should be obvious to anyone with common sense: A low nominal life expectancy did not mean there were not many millions of people who would draw benefits from Social Security within years of its launch. Many people did die before 65, but the deaths with the greatest effect on the metric were preschoolers.

Unfortunately, failure to understand variation around an average leads to other bad advice. What if a 62-year-old man’s financial planner tells him, “your life expectancy is another 19 years so you can plan on living to 81?” If the man responds, “Okay, but what is the chance I will die before that?” he will probably get met with a blank stare. The correct answer would be, “Well, for 1,000 62-year-old men, 476 will die before their 81st birthday.  (Women who are 62 can “expect” to live another 22 years, yet 45.5% would die before reaching age 84.)

But the grim reality is that if you pose this question to 1,000 “financial advisers,” even CPAs or partners in white-shoe Minneapolis law firms, 990 will stare back blankly without the faintest idea of how to answer.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

Now that we’re well into summer, I want to tell you about another of my constellation favorites: Hercules, the upside-down Hero. It’s certainly not one of the brightest constellations, but I love the celestial Hero’s classic story. Hercules is supposed to outline the figure of a mighty hero in Greek mythology, but to me, it looks more like a giant fancy handwritten capital “H” (for Hercules) hanging high in the southeastern sky.

As soon as it’s dark enough, around 10 p.m., start looking for the brightest star you can see very high in the southeast sky. That’s Vega, the brightest star in the diminutive constellation Lyra the Lyre. About 15 to 20 degrees to the upper right of Vega or about two of your fist-widths at arm’s length, look for four moderately bright stars that form a trapezoid. You should be able to see it unless there’s really a lot of light pollution from where you’re observing. That trapezoid is in the center of the Hercules, right about where you’d join to two sides of the “H.”

(Mike Lynch)

One of the best hidden celestial treasures in the entire night sky any time of the year lives within Hercules. It’s the amazing Hercules cluster between the stars that make up the upper right side of the Hercules trapezoid, as you can see in the diagram. It’s wonderful, even if you view it with a small telescope. You can almost see it with the naked eye if you’re stargazing in the super dark countryside. At first, it’ll resemble a faint smudge with a telescope using a low-power magnification eyepiece, but with more magnification, you’ll see a gorgeous spherical cluster of ancient stars known as a globular cluster. This is the best one in our skies.

M13, the Great Hercules Cluster (Mike Lynch)

The great Hercules cluster is about 25,000 light-years, or about 145,000 trillion miles, away. Well over a half million stars may be crammed in an area a little over 800 trillion miles wide. Too many stars are in the center to resolve them individually, but even a moderate telescope can see some individual stars at the edge. As it is with all telescopic viewing, look at the cluster for extended periods with your scope to let your eyes get used to the darkness of the field. I love showing off to the folks at my summer stargazing parties through my larger telescopes. The Hercules cluster is one of many globular clusters that form a halo around our Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers don’t know precisely how they were created, but globular clusters are certainly part of our galaxy’s evolution. One theory is that they could be “mini-galaxies” that the Milky Way gravitationally absorbed.

In Greek Mythology, Hercules was a mighty muscle man. He also had a massive heart for most of his life, except for a brief, awful, insane episode. Young Hercules, a teenager, fell in love with the beautiful but conniving Princess Megara. They foolishly married soon after meeting, but the honeymoon didn’t last very long. Arguments quickly broke out. Hercules felt that there was nothing he could do to please Megara. She picked at Hercules until he blew his stack and temporarily lost his sanity. With his mighty hand, he choked Princess Megara and all her attendants.

Immediately after the massacre, Hercules instantly came to his senses and realized the extent of his horrible deeds. He was beyond sick with guilt and shame and turned himself in, leaving his fate up to Eurystheus, the King of Mycenae and Megara’s father. Even though the wise and highly compassionate king was devastated by the loss of his daughter Megara, he accepted that his son-in-law was genuinely sorry for his crime and the temporary loss of his sanity. Nonetheless, Hercules had to be punished, so Eurystheus assigned Hercules to 12 arduous labors to perform to atone for his crime.

One of his labors was to slay Leo the Lion, the king of kings of all beasts. Using all his strength and brains, he slays the monster lion and completes all his other labors, including taking on a nine-headed snake stealing cattle from a monster.

Zeus, the king of the gods, and all his buddies on Mount Olympus rewarded him at the time of his death for all his great work by placing his body in heaven as the constellation we see through the summer and early fall. They didn’t want Hercules to receive full honors because of his murder conviction, so they hung his body upside down in the heavens.

Celestial hugging this week

(Mike Lynch)

Late next Saturday night, July 13, the first quarter (half moon) will cross in front of the bright star Spica in the low southwestern sky. This stellar eclipse, formally known as an occultation, will begin at 9:56 p.m. as Spica slips behind the darkened eastern half of the moon’s disk. Spica emerges from the lit-up western side of the moon at 11:13 p.m. By then, the moon and Spica will barely be above the southwestern horizon. The moon’s orbit around the earth causes it to migrate gradually to the east against the stellar background. Next Saturday night the moon will just happen to pass in front of Spica, a star over 260 light-years away. Just one light-year equals nearly 6 trillion miles!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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