AZ, I am here as much as before. I don’t want to continue the debate because I get frustrated when talking to missionaries. I’ve had experience with many others, as I made clear at the beginning of this discussion (back on page 4).
But I do owe you an answer to the question you have posed to me so many times. Sorry.
1. I dispute the 3-4%. It is conjured. But this is a minor point.
2. I do not dispute that a 3 yr age difference is considered desirable. I don’t know if it is actually the average, but I would not make this a point of contention since that is the basis of the discussion. In other words, I am trying to defend the practice of allowing an age gap, so why would I dispute that there is one?
As to why there is a second side to the debate, it is because there is so much more to consider than just inputting a growth factor into a spreadsheet. A fifth grade child can tell me what the difference between X * 1.03 ^ 5 and X * 1.03 ^ 2 is. What you are missing is the fact that people are not numbers but people (all actuaries seem to miss this point). They can be represented by numbers if you can account for all their variant behaviors. But you cannot isolate a behavior and model a population based on a single assumption. That is too simplistic. The result of that type of modeling is GIGO.
People die. People get sick. People have disabilities, physical and mental. People can be loners. People can abandon their community. People from outside a community can join. A community can impose harsher standards on certain people than on others. The caveats are endless. Tell me how you accounted for all of this in your model, and then we can renew our discussion.
As I said originally (back on page 4), when the first analyst took up my offer to have me review his model, I suggested some changes and some conservatism and the effect he was trying to prove was nullified.
A suggestion for you, if you are willing, is to actually model a population and include dynamic behaviors, instead of just typing in a number and multiplying it by a factor. Sounds hard? It is! But your way proves naught.