Sergei Scherbov
World Population Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria
Most studies of population aging focus on only one characteristic of people – their chronological age. For example, the Old Age Dependency Ratio categorizes people as “old” at age 65, regardless of whether they were living 50 years ago or are likely to be living 50 years in the future. However, 65-year-olds today generally have higher remaining life expectancies and are healthier than their counterparts in previous generations. Moreover, people of the same age, but living in different parts of the world, are also very different even at the same age. A 65-years old person living in a country with high life expectancy may differ by health, physical and cognitive characteristics from a person of the same age, but living in a country with low life expectancy. This is because age-specific characteristics of people vary over time and place. Aging is a multidimensional process and focusing only on one aspect of the changes entailed in population aging, but not on all the others, provides a limited picture that is often not appropriate for scientific study or policy analysis.
The presentation is devoted to new ways of measuring aging that more accurately represent the real world. It will be shown that once more adequate measures of aging are used, past aging looks very different and, in countries with high life expectancies, almost no aging was observed. Future aging trends look much less gloomy when new indicators of aging are used as compared to traditional approaches. The recently developed characteristics approach for the study of population aging will be introduced and used in evaluating differences in aging across space and time.
(Presented in the 2018 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Culture of Longevity, 15-16 August 2018, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University)