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I think there’s an unwritten rule that every article or policy discussion has to start with some scary statistic about an aging population. So here are some of them From the UN. In the year Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population aged over 60 is expected to nearly double from 12% to 22%. In the year In 2021, there were 17 people aged 65 and over for every 17 people between the ages of 20 and 64 (the so-called “old-age dependency ratio”). By 2050, it will be 29 per 100.
So far, so common. But what if these statistics are not a useful frame for the argument? What if “65 and over” is a bad definition of “old age”? Indeed, what if chronological age is not a good measure of aging?
All a person’s chronology really tells you is how many years they lived. Policymakers are frustrated by statistics like the above because they use chronological age for other things they care about, such as the number of frail or ill people in need of health or social care, or the economic and fiscal impact of fewer workers and more retirees, etc.
If chronological age is a reasonable proxy for all those things, that’s good enough, but is it? A Paper Published last month, economists Rainer Kotsch, David Blue and Andrew Scott argue that relying on chronological age is “very incomplete and very misleading” because it provides “only limited information about the aging process”.
Quite frankly, people of the same age can vary greatly in how frail or well they are. Using data from the United States and the United Kingdom, Kotsche, Bloom, and Scott found that 10 percent of the population in their 90s and over 50s had the same level of frailty as the average 50-year-old. .
Chronological average levels of health and fitness may change over time. For example, in England, 70-year-olds As he says Office of National Statistics.
If you’re using chronological age as a proxy for when people stop working, that varies greatly across countries and over time (and is particularly sensitive to changes in the state pension age). What does the “old age dependency ratio” mean in a country like the UK, which classifies the over 65s as “dependent”, where the share of work will rise from 27% in 2014 to 40% in 2024? ?
As leading researchers in this field are Warren Sanderson and Sergey Sherbov; You put itShould 60-year-olds in Russia in 1950 count as 60-year-old Swedes in 2050? If not, is there a better option?
An alternative proposed by Sanderson and Scherbov is to define “old age” as beginning at 15 years of life expectancy. Through this lens, the past, present, and future look very different.
For example, in the UK, where life expectancy has been rising steadily for up to a decade, between 1981 and 2017 the number of people aged over 65 increased by 8.3 million, but the number of people under 15 fell. At 7.4 million And if you Calculate again Old-age dependency ratios, with this “old” definition, are low in all regions of the world except sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) and are projected to rise much less steeply.
Of course, that may not be the right lens either – it depends on the specific issue you’re concerned with. Take questions about when people should be able to access the state pension. It has been expanding in recent years New “Hours” It aims to determine a person’s “biological age” based on measurements of proteins in the blood. Any system that uses chronology or average life expectancy is unfair to the poor who live shorter lives, so can they one day be used to determine everyone’s retirement age?
Scott told me that even if the clocks were scientifically sound, he wasn’t sure people would accept that. “Two people of the same age, one job . . . But does one get it (will have a state pension) three years ago?
There is no single absolute measure that can replace chronological age as a measure of population aging. But once you see the meaning of “old” as something other than the number of years people have lived, it starts to seem more malleable than inevitable, and those things about aging. The terrible statistics that define speed seem like tests of fate rather than destiny.
