Promising age
The aging of humanity: demographers are changing the evaluation criteria
The number of people who have crossed the threshold of 65 is growing in the world, but this does not mean that the world's population is aging, according to the head of the International Laboratory of Demography and Human Capital of RANEPA Sergey Shcherbov. He stated this while speaking at the expert discussion "The latest approaches to measuring population aging", which took place on January 18 as part of the Gaidar Forum.
According to the demographer, aging should be determined not only and not so much by the number of years a person has lived, but by its main characteristics, and one of the main ones is the life expectancy of people.
In his speech, Shcherbov mentioned horror stories popular in the media about an increasingly aging population (for example, in Europe) and recalled that if in 1953 the oldest person to conquer Everest was a 39-year-old climber, then his follower in 2013 when climbing the "third pole" of the Earth was 80 years!
"Of course, technology is also improving, but the main thing is that people are changing," the demographer noted. "We cannot say that a person who lived 100 years ago had the same characteristics at the age of 65 as someone who turned 65 today."
Based on this, the expert suggested focusing on the so-called promising age.
"In 2005, we introduced a new concept – a promising age," he said. "A lot of decisions that people make in their lives depend on how long they expect to stay on this planet. Previously, it was unthinkable that people in their 50s would enter universities. Now people see that at this age they have a perspective. Perspective age measures how old people are, not from the moment of birth, but from the moment of death."
In other words, someone who was considered an old man 200 years ago will be considered a middle-aged man today.
"Now in Europe, more than 90% of the population lives up to 65 years, and 150 years ago there were only 25% of them," he recalled. – That is, the measure of life expectancy is what tells us whether a person is old or not."
In a sense, according to the expert, we can say that the population is getting younger, not getting older.
"Aging is a multidimensional process, and it is necessary to look at a person's mental and cognitive abilities, consider the whole spectrum and only then build reasonable indicators of aging," he concluded. "It is not good to focus only on age, since with this approach we dump both those who lived 100 years ago and those who lives today, and those who will live in 100 years. They have completely different characteristics and places of residence."
Recall that the maximum (documented) age reached by a representative of the human race was 122 years. If we compare this indicator with how other representatives of the animal world are aging, then we have to state that a person not only does not take the first place here, but is not even among the three conditional leaders. For example, the average life expectancy of Greenland polar sharks is 272 years! One bowhead whale has been wandering around the world for 211 years. Galapagos turtles live up to 170 years. However, all these figures pale in front of the natural Methuselah of the kingdom of nature larrea tridentata – in the Mojave desert grows a clonal colony of these plants aged 11 thousand 700 years!
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