Canada Copes With Aging

Not long ago the news came out of Canada that the number of people aged 65 had just exceeded the number of children aged 0-14. This is, of course, a predictable part of the age transition, but predictable or not, it seems as though Canada--like almost every other country going through the transition--has not planned well. 

The federal government’s failure to address a slew of issues relating to seniors means Canada is “woefully unprepared” to deal with its aging society, a Senate committee heard Tuesday.“Until such time as the Government of Canada makes decisions based on the demographic trends in aging … will we be able to make significant changes,” said retired senator Sharon Carstairs, who has spent decades working in and studying the fields of elderly and palliative care.

Like every other rich country, Canada has high life expectancy (higher than the U.S.) and low fertility (lower than the U.S.), but it also has higher levels of immigration than most other countries. Still, the aging of the baby boomers (who provided a demographic dividend for Canada, just as they did for the U.S.) is problematic. Their economic productivity is at least perceived to lessen with age, just as their health care needs increase.

The issue of the aging population in Canada is of great interest to Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, his office said Tuesday. A spokesperson for Duclos pointed to several steps the government has taken in support of seniors, including restoring the age of eligibility for Old Age Security to 65 from 67, as the previous Conservative government had done.

NO! That is exactly the wrong approach. As people live longer, society needs to support their economic productivity for as long as possible, rather than promoting more dependence. Don't they get it! And, speaking of who needs to get it, I put together the following chart from UN Population Division data. You can see that Canada, Germany, and China are all on track to have just slightly more than half of their population in the ages of 20-64 by 2070. Those are the people in every country who are going to have to suck it up for the older population. China has the more dramatic curve, and is almost certainly the least prepared. They need to pay attention to what other countries like Canada and Germany are doing, albeit choosing more wisely than Canada seems currently to be doing. 

Help Save Funding for Population Science

The budget proposal put out by the Trump administration cuts money from the Census, NIH, and NSF. It is obvious that this administration cares little about science, including that related to demographic issues. Indeed, it is likely that the whole point of a bare bones budget is to allow for a tax cut for the rich. But I digress. We all need to be in touch with our Member of Congress to make sure they understand the long-term harm to humans that will come from cutting back on collecting data in the census and cutting back on scientific research. The Population Association of America put out such a call today:

As you may know, on Tuesday, May 23, 2017, President Trump released his Fiscal Year 2018 Budget Request to Congress -- a document that includes deep, damaging cuts to a wide swath of scientific and statistical agencies that are vital to the work of population scientists. We are particularly concerned about:

National Institutes of Health: A $7.2 billion cut , or 21% reduction 

National Science Foundation: $551 million cut to research accounts (9% reduction) including a $28 million cut to the SBE Directorate

Census Bureau: Proposed an insufficient increase in funding (less than 4%) that is woefully inadequate to fund the critical End-to-End Readiness test in 2018 in preparation for the 2020 decennial census. This jeopardizes not only the accuracy of the 2020 Census, but potentially other core Census programs such as the American Community Survey (ACS), if the Bureau is forced to make unpalatable choices between annual surveys and the decennial census.

The President's Budget Request is only the first step in the federal budget process, and Congress has ultimate authority on appropriations. It is critical that Congress hears from constituents within the scientific community that a dramatic scaling back of the federal investment in scientific research and quality data collection threatens the economy as well as the productivity, health and well-being of the American people. Your voice is needed now, as the appropriations process gets underway, before spending decisions have been made. Read the statement from PAA President Amy Tsui and APC President Steve Ruggles concerning the Trump Budget Request.

This is really important. Contact your Member of Congress ASAP about this. 

Did You Remember That It's Been Almost 100 Years Since the Spanish Flu Epidemic?

In August of 1918, just as World War I was ending, the Spanish influenza hit the world scene, killing tens of millions of people--more than had died in the war itself. To celebrate the millennium of this horrific event, a new book is coming out and, although it isn't yet available in the U.S., it was just reviewed in The Economist. The book is titled Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, and it is by Laura Spinney, an English writer.

BY EARLY 1920, nearly two years after the end of the first world war and the first outbreak of Spanish flu, the disease had killed as many as 100m people— more than both world wars combined. Yet few would name it as the biggest disaster of the 20th century. Some call it the “forgotten flu”. Almost a century on, “Pale Rider”, a scientific and historic account of Spanish flu, addresses this collective amnesia.

Now, for the record, if you've read my Population text, you will remember my talking about this (page 143 in the 12th edition), in which I reference a book by Alfred Crosby, that came out in 1989. The title of his book was America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918.  As you can see, we have a need to keep reminding ourselves about this pandemic!

What seems to be particularly useful about the new book by Spinney is her global perspective--showing how much of the world was affected by this flu--and her discussion of how this very importantly moved along the global research on viruses.

Influenza, like all viruses, is a parasite. Laura Spinney traces its long shadow over human history; records are patchy and uncertain, but Hippocrates’s “Cough of Perinthus” in 412BC may be its first written description. Influenza-shaped footprints can be traced down the centuries: the epidemic that struck during Rome’s siege of Syracuse in 212BC; the febris italica that plagued Charlemagne’s troops in the ninth century. The word “influenza” started being used towards the end of the Middle Ages from the Italian for “influence”—the influence of the stars. That was the state of knowledge then; in some ways at the start of the 20th century it was little better.

Now, to be sure, we don't usually think of a virus as being a parasite--e.g., malaria is caused by a parasite, whereas influenza is not considered to be a parasite under any definition of which I am aware, but that's not important right now. The point is that 100 years ago were just beginning to get a handle on bacteria, but viruses were not yet capable of being seen under existing microscopes. Once better equipment was invented in the 1930s, viruses moved from the theoretical to the real, and we were able to cope better with these things, figuring out over time how to invent vaccines for as many deadly viruses as we can. 

These stories are important reminders of how vastly different a world we live in today than did people of 100 years ago. 

Has India Already Overtaken China in Population Size?

China has been more populous than India for centuries, but every population projection shows that India will soon overtake it and claim the trophy for the world's biggest population. This is due almost entirely to China's below-level fertility compared to India's above replacement level fertility. Now a Chinese demographer based at the University of Wisconsin, Yi Fuxiang, has suggested that India may already has surpassed China in population size. The NYTimes reports on this:

China’s real population may be 1.29 billion people, 90 million fewer than the government’s estimate of 1.38 billion in 2016, Mr. Yi told a meeting at Peking University on Monday, citing what he said were telltale inconsistencies among birthrate, hospital and school statistics. India’s population, on the other hand, had grown to 1.33 billion in 2016, according to the United Nations.

Mr. Yi’s claims met skepticism from demographers, who said he had misread or exaggerated statistical discrepancies. But Mr. Yi said he was not just splitting statistical hairs. China’s birthrate will determine the size of the work force sustaining its economy, and the data indicated that stagnation could occur in coming decades, he said.

Since the rest of us haven't yet seen Xi's analysis in published form, it is impossible to judge whether or not China's population size is really less than we might think. At the same time, we can ask whether this matters very much. After all, no one thinks that China will have the most people for very much longer. The projections made by demographers at the Wittgenstein Centre in Vienna suggest that India will have surpassed China by 2020--which is only three years from now. Demographers at the United Nations Population Division project that India will have overtaken China by 2025. That is still only a few years from now. It's going to happen soon, folks, even if we aren't quite there yet.

How Many Old People Have Ever Lived?

This is the question answered by a paper just published in Demographic Research by researchers at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human  Capital in Vienna. Here's what prompted them to look at this issue:

A recent [2014] article in the Economist describes how those “age invaders” are about to change the global economy. Besides the old age dependency ratio, in this publication another indicator of aging is mentioned: The ratio 65 or older alive today relative to all humans who have ever reached the age of 65. According to the Economist , Fred Pearce presumed that it is possible that half of all people who have ever been over 65 are alive today. Motivated by these discussions, in our paper we reconsider indicators that estimate the share of people above a specific age alive today in relation to all the humans who have ever reached this specific age. By using formal demography together with historical data on population processes, we show how such indicators can be estimated. Our results indicate that far fewer than half of all people who have ever been over 65 are [were] alive in 2010.

Indeed, their results suggest that "the proportion who have ever been over 65 that are alive today (as of 2010) ranges between 5.5 and 9.5%." You can compare these numbers with my latest estimates (in the 12th edition) of the percentage of all humans ever born who are currently alive:

In fact, our current contribution to history’s total represents only a relatively small fraction of all people who have ever lived. The most analytical of the estimates has been made by Nathan Keyfitz (Keyfitz 1966; Keyfitz and Caswell 2005), and I have used Keyfitz’s formulas to estimate the number of people who have ever lived, assuming conservatively that we started with two people (call them “Adam and Eve” if you’d like) 200,000 years ago. The results of these calculations suggest that a total of 62.6 billion people have been born, of whom the 7.3 billion estimated to be alive in 2015 constitute 11.7 percent. (Weeks, 12th edition, page 34.)

Interestingly enough, I blogged about the Economist's story on aging at the time, but for whatever reason did not pick up on and try to correct the comment that perhaps half of all people ever to reach age 65 were currently alive. Thanks to the folks in Vienna for filling in that gap.