the growing importance of gifts between living individuals has partly compensated for this aging effect, and in part because it may be that people are inheriting later but receiving larger amounts, since wealth tends to age in an aging society. In other words, the downward trend in the mortality rate—ineluctable in the very long run—can be compensated by a similar structural increase in the relative wealth of older people, so that the product μ × m remains unchanged or in any case falls much more slowly than some have believed.
