Some have said to bet on the younger = McCartney. I don’t disagree.
But there’s an odd effect that gets bigger as you get out towards the end of the actuarial tables. Your remaining life expectancy doesn’t go up as you get older, but your half-life and hence likely age at death actually gets later & later. Just not at a one-for-one rate or else you’d (statistically) live forever.
Here’s the official mortality tables used by the US Social Security Administration. It’s also used by the IRS & a bunch of other legislative stuff involving life expectancies. Obvious the Beatles are Brits, but the same concept holds although doubtless the British government has tables with slightly different numbers on them.
The easy thing to understand is the “life expectancy” column. The simple interpretation is "If today is your 0th, 10th, 75th, 80th, whatever-th birthday, the life expectancy column shows how many years it’ll take for half the currently living people of your sex and birthdate to die. It’s your surviving birthday cohort’s half-life.
John & Ringo were born 2 years less 3 weeks apart. So 101 weeks. We can ignore the 3 weeks as noise and just say they’re exactly 2 years apart, currently 78 & 80. For comparison purposes we can ignore the fact their birthdays were around July 1 and now it’s mid-Sep; they’re both affected (almost) equally by that difference.
The table says a 78 year old birthday boy (John) has a half-life of 9.37 years and so is half-dead at 78.00 + 9.37 = 87.37 years.
The 80 yo birthday boy (Ringo) has a half-life of 8.28 years and so is half-dead at 80.00 + 8.28 = 88.28 years.
Yes, the sorta surprising result is the 80yo is probably going to live to be older than the 78 yo. But only 1-ish year older so he’s still going to be the first to die, given his 2 year head start in the race to the grave.
My bottom line, and knowing exactly zero about their health history, living arrangements, earlier partying habits, etc. is
- Older Ringo will die first before younger Paul does AND
- Older Ringo will live to a greater age than younger Paul does.
Or at least that’s the way to bet given no other info about them as individuals.