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After I put up my last post, where I gave updated probabilities of each current Q15 member becoming Church president, a friend asked me if I had ever looked at sensitivity of these probabilities to the death of one Q15 member. So, for example, Russell M. Nelson is 99. If he died tomorrow, this would obviously have a big effect on the chances for Dallin H. Oaks, as he’d become Church president. But what about all the men junior to him? And you could ask the same question about each Q15 member. Like David A. Bednar seems a pretty good bet to become Church president at some point, but if out of the blue, he died tomorrow, how would that shuffle the probabilities for the men junior to him?

I recalculated all the yearly probabilities of being Church president for each of the 14 remaining members of the Quorum, with each current member being removed in turn. I used the same method and same actuarial table as in my last post. For simplicity, I didn’t do any of the health adjustments that I tried in that post; I just stuck with the base case of the unadjusted mortality table probabilities for each man (still depending on age, though).

To make the results easier to look at, I’m showing them organized by surviving member rather than by dying member. That is, I have one graph showing all the probability changes for Dallin H. Oaks if someone senior to him died (of course there’s just one man senior to him: Russell M. Nelson) and then another graph for all the probability changes for M. Russell Ballard if someone senior to him died, and so forth. Also, so you can compare the graphs to the ones in my last post, I’m keeping each man’s line color the same as in the last post and also keeping the scale of the Y-axis constant for all the graphs. In each graph, I’m making the original probability curve solid and then making dashed all the probability curves that would result if another senior member died. This might sound too messy to look at, but I think it turns out to not be too bad because the probability curves shift in regular ways, and don’t jump and cross each other all willy-nilly. Anyway, I’m hoping that even if this explanation of the graphs doesn’t make total sense, once you look at a couple of the them, it will be clearer.

There are a couple of other things to note about the graphs. One is that to avoid having the graphs for the more junior members be really cluttered, I’m only showing modified probability curves for a senior member’s death changes the member in question’s probability by at least one percentage point in at least one year. For example, Russell M. Nelson’s death would have a near zero impact on Ulisses Soares’s probabilities, as Elder Soares is already very likely to outlive President Nelson, and his chances of becoming Church president depend much more heavily on the life expectancies of men closer to him in seniority, like Gerrit W. Gong, for example. The other last thing to note is that because I only checked probabilities in yearly steps, pairs of Q15 members who are the same age as of the start date have exactly the same effects on probabilities for members junior to them if they (the members who are the same age) were to die. This means that there are two pairs of members, Jeffrey R. Holland and Dieter F. Uchtdorf (both 82) and Neil L. Andersen and Ronald A. Rasband (both 72), for whom the adjusted probability lines for men junior to both of them are identical, so I’ve just labeled them with both men’s names.

Okay, enough preamble. Here’s the graph for Dallin H. Oaks.

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Who among the Q15 will eventually become president of the Church? This is always an interesting question for a couple of reasons, I think. One is that the members of the Q15, even though they typically present a united front, clearly have different visions for what the Church should be. So it actually matters who makes the top spot and who doesn’t. Of course the most obvious example of this is that Russell M. Nelson was clearly fuming about use of the label “Mormon” for decades, and it was only after he finally became Church president that he could finally impose his idea on the rest of us.

The other reason I think this is such an engaging question is that it seems so tantalizingly tractable! There aren’t a million variables and unknown unknowns to account for. There’s just this very simple succession rule, and this well-defined pool of candidates, and so who gets to become president boils down to who outlives who. And it seems like we should be able to predict that, right? Right??

Of course the answer is no, but it’s fun to try anyway. I looked at this question the same way I have in previous posts (e.g., in 2015, in 2018). On the advice of an actuary friend of mine, I use a handy mortality table (specifically, the part for white collar males, employees up until the series ends at age 80, and healthy annuitant thereafter) provided by the Society of Actuaries. I’ll explain the details at the end of the post if you’re interested, but for now I’ll just say that I can use the table to work out each man’s probability of surviving to any particular future age, and from that and the probabilities of surviving for Q15 members senior to him, his probability of being church president.

When I’ve done this type of analysis before, commenters have asked the reasonable question of whether I couldn’t make an adjustment for the Q15 members’ health. I have had two concerns with trying to do this. First, it’s hard to know how to assign levels of health in any reliable way, and second, even if I did know how healthy each of them were, I’m not sure how to adjust the mortality tables in response.

But in this post, I’m throwing caution to the wind and trying an adjustment. I’m using a very crude health categorization: I’m adjusting mortality rates only for the two Q15 members who weren’t at October Conference in person, namely Russell M. Nelson and Jeffrey R. Holland. I worked around my second concern by trying a range of possible adjustments. I adjusted the yearly mortality rates for President Nelson and Elder Holland by increasing them by 10%, 20%, 50%, and 100%. (Note that it’s really easy to mix up percentage changes and percentage point changes. These are percentage changes. So for example, if a table mortality probability is 3%, then the adjusted rates for the various increases are 3.3% [adding 10% of 3%], 3.6% [adding 20% of 3%], 4.5% [adding 50% of 3%], and 6% [adding 100% of 3%].)

The graph below shows the probability of each Q15 member being church president for each year for the next few decades. The solid lines show the unadjusted probabilities, and the dashed lines show the probabilities with a 50% adjustment.

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Note: In the original version of this post, I had Elders Gong and Soares out of order at the bottom of the graph. Thanks to Jim, who commented on the previous post to point out the problem, I’ve now fixed it.

While I was working on my last post about each Q15 member’s probability of becoming Church President, I realized that I could look at the question a different way. Rather than calculating probability, I could work out how long each member would have to live in order to outlive everyone senior to him. For those much younger than those senior to them, this will be a relatively young age; for those close in age or perhaps even older than those senior to them, this will be a greater age. I know probability answers the question of who’s likely to make the top spot more directly, but I like the vividness of the how long would he have to live question.

Using the same method I used in the last post (see the Method section below for details), I calculated the life expectancy for each current Q15 member from the SOA mortality table I’ve been using. Then it was straightforward to also find, for each member, the longest remaining life expectancy of any other member senior to him, and from that, the age he would have to reach to become Church President.

I thought it would also be fun to look at needed life expectancy to become Church President for past Q15 members. This is even easier to calculate, as everyone’s lifespan is already known, so there are no life expectancy calculations required. For each member, I just noted the latest death date of anyone senior to him, and subtracted the member’s birthday to get the age he needed to reach to become Church President.

The graph below shows life expectancy needed to reach the presidency for all Q15 members back to Heber J. Grant. It’s a little busy, so let me walk you through what’s in it.

• Fatter bars with lighter shading show needed life expectancy to become Church President.
• Skinnier bars with darker shading show actual lifespan (or current age for living members).
• Outlined white bars tacked on the skinny bars for living members show remaining life expectancy.
• Gray and black bars give actual, known values.
• Blue bars are based on at least some life expectancy estimation.
• Note that the graph cuts off the ages 0 to 20 to focus better on the ages where there are differences.

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Note: As Jim pointed out in the comments, I mixed up the ordering of the two most junior Q15 members, Elders Gong and Soares. I clearly need to work on my quality control. 🙂 In any case, as it was straightforward to do, I’ve corrected the yearly probabilities graph below. Because it would require more work, I haven’t fixed the remainder of the post with all the parent lifespan-adjusted probabilities. They’re still mostly correct; just ignore the lines for Elders Gong and Soares.

I’ve blogged a number of times about probabilities of Q15 members becoming Church President (see the bottom of this post for links). I’ve always used a pretty similar method to get probabilities: use a single mortality table for all members, simulate their predicted lifespans a bunch of times by drawing random numbers and comparing them to the mortality table, and then check what the implication is in each simulation for who gets to be Church President and for how long.

A suggestion that commenters have sometimes made is that I could adjust the expected lifespans of each Q15 member based on how long his parents lived, as surely longevity is at least partly heritable. In this post, I’ll show results from my attempt to make just such an adjustment. I’ve got to warn you, though: this is based on kind of seat-of-the-pants reasoning, and I’ll understand if you don’t buy the assumptions I made. See the Method section below if you want the details.

First, though, here’s an up-to-date version of the yearly probability of being President graph that I’ve also shown in a few previous posts. This doesn’t include the adjustments based on parent lifespan that I’ll talk about below. I just take the yearly mortality probabilities for each Q15 member, given their age, from the Society of Actuaries’ RP-2014 table (specifically, white collar males, employee up until age 80, and healthy annuitant after that), and for each member, his probability of being Church President in a year is his probability of surviving to that year times the probability that all the men senior to him have died by that year.

As has been the case since I first looked at this question over a decade ago, it’s President Oaks, Elder Holland, and Elder Bednar who look like the best bets to become Church President. Elders Uchtdorf, Andersen, Stevenson, and Soares might have a shot. The remainder are less likely.

However, keep in mind that the biggest weakness of this analysis is that a mortality table describes the lifespan of large groups of people, and works less well for small groups or individuals. If you’re placing bets on who in the Q15 might become Church President, sure, Elder Bednar is probably a better bet than Elder Cook. But in a tiny sample like 15 men, all kinds of things could happen. Elder Bednar might contract an incurable illness tomorrow. Elder Cook might live to be 110.

President Nelson is a great illustration of how big errors can get. In my first post on the topic, back in 2009, my custom mortality table gave him only a 23% chance of becoming Church President, and an estimated 2.4 years in the position if he did make it. He’s obviously made it to the top spot now, and he’s been in for over three years and seems to be going strong. Of course a 23% chance isn’t really that close to zero, but for sure if I had placed bets in 2009, I wouldn’t have predicted Elder Nelson would ever become President Nelson. So the method can make mistakes, big ones. But of course that doesn’t stop me from using it. I can hardly contain myself, as it’s just so darned entertaining to speculate and guess, and to cloak my guesses in at least a veneer of reasonableness.

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How often do General Authorities call their relatives to also be General Authorities? A friend asked me this question, and I thought it might be an interesting one to look at. Off the top of my head, I thought the answer would be that this happens a lot. For example, I remember President Hinckley protesting that he had nothing to do with the calling of his son as a Seventy, and I know about historical examples like Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Parley and Orson Pratt, and Bruce R. McConkie being Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law.

To make the question more manageable, I decided to look only at members of the Quorum of the Twelve rather than all GAs. This includes nearly all First Presidency members too because I looked at data at the person level (meaning that each Q12 member was counted only once, versus for example looking at the composition of the Q12 each year or something like that) and nearly all FP members were also Q12 members at one point.

The first analysis I did was kind of a quick-and-dirty approach that I think is nevertheless kind of fun. I listed the last names of all Q12 members, and then checked whether each, at the time of his call, brought a new last name to the Quorum. For example, two Johnson and two Pratts were called in the original Q12, so among the four of them, they brought only two unique last names. In this analysis, I counted Smith as being a duplicate the first time it was used, given that Joseph Smith was the head of the Church, even though he wasn’t a member of the Q12.

The graph below shows, across time, the cumulative count of number of Q12 members called (blue line), and the cumulative count of unique last names for those Q12 members (red line). If every single Q12 member had a unique last name, the two lines would be on top of each other. They separate to the degree that new Q12 members have last names that duplicate last names of previous Q12 members. Note that on the horizontal axis, I separated 1835 out as its own bin, because that’s the year the original Q12 were called. After that, I grouped years into 15-year bins, which I know is a little odd, but the calling of new Q12 members is such an infrequent event that when I used 10-year bins, there were several decades with few to no new calls.

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Yes. Yes they do.

Or, at least it looks like they do more on Facebook. Here’s a list of the most common patterns of likes of Q15 members by women and men. In the second row, liking Elder Uchtdorf alone is done by 6% of women but only 4% of men. The two percentage point difference (in the last column) is the largest difference for any Q15 like pattern. (Perhaps he really does need to cover up to prevent the women of the Church from sinning in their thoughts!) The pattern men have most compared to women is liking all Q15 members but the three most junior, which 2.5% of men, but only 1.3% of women do.

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Here’s a chart showing the total number of likes of Q15 members on Facebook as of late March of this year. Of course, the numbers have shifted a fair amount since then, especially for President Nelson, who’s gotten a big bump since becoming President.

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