Halley computed age-scaled annuity prices in his 1693 paper, yet the British government kept selling annuities at a single flat price for decades

Halley's 1693 Breslau paper did not stop at tabulating mortality. Using the survivorship data, he computed the present value of an annuity on a life as a function of the nominee's age, discounting future payments at 6% — so a young life, likely to draw payments for many years, was worth far more than an old one. Per Ciecka's analysis, a nominee aged 5 was worth roughly 13.4 years' purchase and one aged 60 roughly 7.6. This is the correct actuarial logic: price the contract to the expected duration of the obligation.

The insight was ignored. "The British government did not change its single-price policy after Halley's work" — it continued selling life annuities at a flat seven years' purchase regardless of the nominee's age. Per Ciecka, that flat price was about half the fair value of an annuity on a nominee aged 5, 10, or 15 and "poor governmental policy for all nominees under age 60": buyers naming young lives were under-charged at the treasury's expense, and only the oldest nominees (65 and up, worth 6.5 years' purchase or less) paid more than the annuity was worth. (Corrected at audit 2026-07-12: an earlier wording had the subsidy running from young to old — the source supports the reverse.) Halley's own age-scaling therefore sat unused for roughly six decades until James Dodson revived it for life assurance, feeding the Society for Equitable Assurances founded in 1762 (by deed of trust, not charter — per the Dodson note's 2026-07-12 correction). Dodson's celebrated innovation was, in this light, the recovery of a buried insight already present in Halley's founding paper.

Because the method waited until after Halley's 1742 death to be implemented, it forms the actuarial half of the symmetry in observation-halley-founded-parallax-and-actuarial-pricing-both-vindicated-posthumously — the same posthumous-adoption pattern as his transit-of-Venus proposal.

Part of moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag — this note is where the lag begins.