I’m so happy that I was so wrong last week when I predicted that President Nelson would call two white men from Utah to fill the openings in the Quorum of the Twelve. I’m thrilled that Elders Gong and Soares can bring some new perspectives to the Q15. And of course, one of the first things I looked up when I learned that they had been called was how old they are, because I was curious about what the chances were that either of them would make it to be Church President.
In this post, I’ve updated the simulation that I’ve run before to estimate the probabilities of each Q15 member becoming Church President. I last did this just a few months ago when President Monson passed away. The gist of it is that I use a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries, assume that the yearly mortality probabilities apply to all members of the Q15 equally, and then run a bunch of simulations (100,000 in this case) and in each, pick a bunch of random numbers and compare them to the mortality probabilities for each member and use the comparison to work out how much longer each man would live, and the resulting way that the Presidency would be handed from one member to the next–which members would get to serve as President and which ones wouldn’t. The process is described in a little more detail in this post from 2015. Anyway, the numbers for the most senior 13 members have changed little since my post in January. What’s interesting here is the probabilities for the new Q15 members.
The table below shows the probability of each Q15 member becoming Church President, and how many years he would serve if he did. Note that if you compare carefully, you might notice some small discrepancies between this table and the one in my January post. When I was running the simulations for this post, I realized that when I ran simulations for my January post, I had calculated current age by rounding to the nearest birthday (e.g., a man who is 65 and 7 months is counted as being 66) rather than the more conventional approach of calculating it by just looking at last birthday passed. If you noticed this error in the previous post and didn’t feel the need to correct me, thank you!
As you can guess from the title of this post, I was thinking that Elder Soares might have a good chance of eventually becoming President. He does follow the pattern of other Q15 members who also have high probabilities: as he enters the quorum, he is younger than anyone senior to him. Unfortunately (for his chances), he’s not that much younger. He’s not quite three years younger than Elder Stevenson. He also faces a logjam of men currently in their sixties who are ahead of him in seniority. He is likely to outlive any one of them, but as you can see in the table, his probability of outliving all of them is only about one in three.
Among other quorum members, President Oaks still shows a high probability, given that he’s next in line and eight years younger than President Nelson. Then just a couple of men down, Elder Holland is eight years younger than anyone senior to him. And a couple of more down, Elder Bednar is over a decade younger than anyone senior to him.
The graph below shows each member’s probability of being President by year. Again, this looks very much like what I posted in January, with the exception of the new data on the two new members. Note also that I’ve changed the Y-axis to show only probabilities up to 60% to make it easier to see the bunched up lines at the bottom, and I’ve extended the time period covered out to 2053 so I could include each quorum member’s peak probability year.
This makes even clearer than the table, I think, how much the Oaks-Holland-Bednar progression seems likely to happen. But then, this is not new information. I think this order of Church Presidents has seemed likely ever since I started looking at this stuff almost ten years ago.
Fascinating, thanks. I would be so interested to see a chart comparing the mortality of the wives to the husbands in the quorum–it seems like a disproportionate number of those women die before their husbands (given that women usually outlive men)–just recently, I think these prophets/apostles have all lost their spouses first: Lee, Hunter, Hinckley, Monson, Nelson, Oaks, Scott, Perry. I know Sisters Eyring and Ballard are both quite ill. What does that say about the stress/health of the wives for these callings?
That’s a great question, acw. I imagine it would be awfully stressful. I’ve actually thought about looking into the question of how long GAs’ wives live compared to a mortality table, but unfortunately, unlike with their husbands, the Church doesn’t publish the birth dates of the women. At least not that I could find.
I don’t think it would take too long to look up the ages of the deceased wives (FamilySearch, Google); living ones could probably be found pretty easily with public records searches. Email me if you have interest in creating such a chart and I could pursue the research end.
Would you do another one for acting President of the Q12?
Hi everyone:
Coincidentally, I have been researching this very question over the last two months and have built a spreadsheet of all Quorum of the Twelve members from Thomas B. Marsh to Dale G. Renlund along with their first wives. I gathered birth, marriage, ordination, and death data through Google, FamilySearch, JSPP, etc. (I haven’t yet updated my spreadsheet with the two newest apostles.)
I was first interested in this when I previously realized that of the 17 Presidents of the Church, only three were outlived by their first wife (Joseph Smith, David O. McKay, and Spencer W. Kimball). Obviously, Joseph would be an outlier having died so young, so that immediately got me wondering about all of the past and present Twelve along with their first wives. By the way, excluding Joseph, but retaining Russell M. Nelson, leads you to an average life span of 87.4 versus 67.1 for their respective first wives. This gap narrows significantly when you pull out Mirriam Young, Charlotte Snow, and Louie Smith-wife of Joseph Fielding since they died during child-bearing years at very young ages. The average life span of the first wives of the presidents jumped to 75.5 years as a result.
So, I really wanted to see how things played out with the first 100 apostles. Here’s what I discovered:
• The average life span for the first 100 apostles = 75.8 years; for their first wives = 71.2 years
• In the United States, over the 20th century: average U.S. male life span = 63.4 years; average female life span = 68.5
(I know that the first 100 apostles encompass three different centuries, but all I have taken time to find on the internet thus far, was the 20th century stats on life span for those who make it at least to age twenty.)
So, I was noticing the opposite direction for the women’s life span when compared to national averages. Eventually I decided to pull the 16 Presidents out of the analysis (remember Joseph was never in the Quorum of the Twelve so that’s why I say 16) and I noticed this:
• Average age of all the Q of Twelve members = 73.5; average age of their first wives = 72.2
The gap narrowed significantly for all 84 apostles (not including the 16 presidents) and that is when I figured that we must be dealing with a very biased sub-sample. What do all 16 presidents (Brigham to Russell) have in common? They have all had to outlive their colleagues in order to make it to prophet in the first place and it’s no wonder that they tend to outlive their first wife bucking the nationwide statistical patterns.
I also kept wondering about the widow to widower ratio (right now in the United States it’s about a 4 to 1 ratio according to the 2001 AARP statistics). When you look at all of the first 100 apostles (I haven’t updated to included Elders Gong and Soares) who have served in the Twelve and have either passed away or their first wife has passed away you arrive at 73 for the sample. Of those 73 couples, 31 of the first wives passed away before their apostle husband and 42 outlived their apostle husband. This is about a 1.4 ratio of widow to widower. Keep in mind that back in the 1940’s it was reported that the widow to widower ratio was closer to 2 to 1.
I also learned that apostles on average tended to marry a woman 0.3 years younger, whereas the nationwide statistics lately suggest that men tend to marry men about 2.3 years younger on average.
I came to the conclusion that I would need more information on both widowhood ratios and life span gaps across the years from 1835 to the present to do a descent analysis and that’s when I got tired.
But I might mention that I thought for sure I would be able to show that first wives of polygamist apostles would surely pass away first when compared to non-polygamist first wives. (After all, if I were a first wife of an apostle, I think I would have felt “replaceable” and start to wonder if it was all worth it.) Unfortunately, the data proved otherwise. Of the 100 first apostles, 33 practiced polygamy (either within the guidelines of the Church or without) and it turned out that the average life span was 69.2 years for the first wives of polygamous apostles versus 64.9 years for the non-polygamous apostles. In terms of widowhood: 9 out of 27 of polygamous first wives passed away first, but 7 out of 16 of non-polygamous passed away first. Opposite of what my intuition was leading me to although these are too small of sample to suggest much.
Finally, I find it absolutely amazing that Elder Gong mentioned just last weekend how his wife Susan was there with him for the calling interview. This is a wonderful sign of positive change. These women have traditionally been finding out via a phone-call from their husband. (Despite the fact that bishops, stake presidents, and mission presidents most likely find out about the calling together.) When you consider the rest of their life is about to change big time, it only feels right that they be there with their husband to learn of the call to the apostleship. My understanding is that the previous ordinations of Elders Rasband, Stevenson, and Renlund took place with their wives present (that is apparently a first as well).
The journey I took to pull all of these statistics together gave me a greater opportunity to reflect on the sacrifices of both husband and wife in this challenging calling. I’m still wondering whether women married to apostles are living fewer years than Mormon women married to non-apostles or said differently–are dying before their husband at a greater weight when compared to non-apostle marriages. Unfortunately I don’t have longitudinal data over the decades from the membership at large. I do know, however, that in a study done recently in Utah, we have seen an LDS male life span = 79 years and LDS female life span = 83.3 years and the discrepancy in the marriage gap that I mentioned above combine with this to suggest a statistical significance perhaps after all.
So, someone who wants to really dig deeper could try to “cut to the chase” and research this out with more clarity by investigating the widowhood statistics within the membership at large.
Bottom line for me:
My intuition still suggests that it’s very hard to be an apostle’s first wife considering the life-time tenure issue and that they might be living fewer years than we would anticipate.
I apologize for the length of this, but it just saved me from writing an article (an intimidating notion for me). I hope it helped provide some helpful angles in the original question which you have probably have already forgotten by now if you actually made it to the end of my comment. All the best!
Wow, Fan of First Wives! Thanks for your amazing comment! I love that you pulled all these results together.
Just grabbing one result that stuck out to me, I’m guessing it’s too small to be meaningful, but that difference between an average age difference of 0.3 years for apostles and their wives versus 2.3 for couples more generally is fascinating. I would never have guessed the difference would run in that direction.
acw, thanks! That would be great! I’ll email you if/when I look into those questions.
ADM, I’m sorry, but I think looking at the acting president of the Q12 would be more complicated than I’m ready to tackle right now. The issue is that I’d have to not only figure out who’s going to be President (which is relatively easy since it’s just the most senior member), but also who gets called as counselors, since that affects when someone is bumped up to acting president of the Q12 to take the place of someone called as a counselor. And figuring out who’s going to be called as counselors is not at all as straightforward as figuring out who’s going to be President.
Fan of First Wives—Wow!! Thanks for looking into this and sharing your fascinating results. It would make a great article too ?
You make a good point that these men are chosen in part for their longevity which skews things—and I wonder how much the prayer support of millions also helps? Now I’ll need to start asking for the Lord to bless the church leaders and their wives!
Given how much older Nelson wad than both Monson and Oaks, it would be interesting to see what things looked like each decade or so. I.e. – when Kimball was President, how well could an actuary table have predicted the following three President? Or why McKay or JFS became President. Nut that I’m suggesting you do those. . 🙂
Wow, fun times on a phone… how that comment is intelligible enough.
It would be interesting to see what would happen to the probabilities if you could somehow factor in the ages of each apostle’s parents when they died, which would certainly influence the longevity of each apostle. For instance, Elder Packer and Elder Nelson were only days apart in age, but they looked 20 years apart at the end. This is not entirely surprising, considering that Nelson’s parents died at ages 93 and 90, while Packer’s parents died at ages 73 and 76. Other factors are probably also relevant, such as weight (obesity) and physical fitness. I know that’s a lot of work, but this study could be nuanced a bit more to get a clearer probability picture.
Thanks Ziff for your patience with my lengthy comment and I appreciated your comment and interest about the age gap issue.
So, this morning when re-checking my spreadsheet data, I realized that I had made one minor error in my summary. The 0.3 (actually 0.36 by the way) year age gap between apostle and first wife actually applies to only the 17 presidents (Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson) and not to the 100 apostles in the Quorum of the Twelve. It turns out that Q of Twelve members have a 2.5 year gap (overall since 1835), but a 1.3 year gap for those apostles ordained in the 1900s. So your comment about a small sample is very appropriate obviously.
Also, I’ve been showing my results to a few colleagues of mine and one of them pointed out that, in addition to the complication of time span (1835 to the present) that tends to “muddy the waters” a little, there might be a potential confounding factor going on that I hadn’t thought about very carefully:
that is, the national life expectancy figures that are for all women may differ from my small sample of apostle first wives due to issue of death during pregnancy or childbirth. Since the majority of these women that were married to apostles had children, perhaps their life expectancy would tend to be lower than the aggregate figures of the nation which surely include both women who gave birth and women who did not?
Just a thought. Thanks again for your article and I apologize if my comment side-track your original article on probabilities of becoming a church president.
Best regards.
That’s an interesting follow-up, Fan of First Wives. It’s a good point that women who did not bear children would be expected to outlive women who did, especially during the 19th century (and before).
No worries at all about side-tracking! I’ve written posts like this a number of times, and there’s mostly nothing new under the sun. Your data are far more interesting! If you’re interested, we’d love to have you write your results up as a guest post, which would open the fun possibility of adding accompanying tables and graphs. 🙂 If you’re interested, you can reach me at zdziff at gmail dot com.
Great article! Thanks.
I also appreciate your follow-up and everyone’s comments. As I looked at the graph, it occurred to me how fascinating it would be to see a “real-time” chart as each member of the Quorum of the 12 died and a new one was called, sort of how the Latter-day Apostles app shows the make-up of the Quorum with each death & new calling.
That’s a great idea, Random Guy. It would be cool to have such a thing set up so you could manipulate it and look at how the probabilities change over time. It’s not quite as cool because it’s static (and a decade out of date, now), but I wrote a post once where I looked at changes in probabilities over time for Q15 members from 1950 forward.
https://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2009/11/06/more-church-president-probabilities/
So I’m jumping in late, obviously, but I am curious to what extent we could adjust these based on public health concerns? How difficult is it to adjust the data based on subsets of cancer, alzheimer’s, major and minor surgeries, etc. (things that recent apostles have all dealt with). For instance, despite being older than Monson, we all were reasonably sure for the past 2-3 years that Nelson would become President of the church, because of Monson’s obviously deteriorating health and Nelson’s obviously good health (at least for his age). The opposite was true of Packer, who we were reasonably sure would never outlast Monson due to his failing health his past few years.
Just curious.
Does this take into account their genetic predisposition for longevity? There should be data available on how long their parents and grandparents lived.
Sorry, duschin and GT, I haven’t made any adjustments to the life expectancy tables.