Wealthy Countries Need to Rethink What It Means to Be Old

A study published in the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2018 supports the concept of viewing older people not in terms of their chronological ages, but in terms of their remaining life expectancy, reports The Conversation . The goal of the research was to determine whether population aging will come to an end in the foreseeable future, especially in wealthier nations where public concern about population aging is most pronounced. Countries with a gross national income per capita at or above $4,000, including Barbados, Croatia, the United States, China, Russia, and South Africa, were considered. A computer program generated 1,000 random possible future populations for these countries, extrapolated from the United Nations' forecasts of population sizes and age structures. The probability that population aging would come to an end this century was computed by analyzing the proportion of the population above a certain age, using an adjusted measure cutoff of 65 (based on a remaining life expectancy of 15 years). The median age of the population was studied, and the use of unadjusted measures revealed that population aging persists through the end of the century. However, usage of adjusted measures found population aging generally ends well before then. According to the second measure, in more than 95 percent of 1,000 simulated futures, populations stopped growing older by 2050.