Average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age

Warren C. Sanderson () and Sergei Scherbov
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Warren C. Sanderson: State University of New York at Stony Brook
Sergei Scherbov: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Nature, 2005, vol. 435, issue 7043, 811-813

Abstract: How long have you got? Conventional measures of age count years since birth. But as lives lengthen, it becomes important for many aspects of decision making to think of age also in terms of years left until death or in proportion to the expanding life span. Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov, two of the authors of the paper “The end of world population growth” (Nature 412, 543–545; 2001) that has been influential in shaping population predictions, have turned their attention to this aspect of ageing. They present a new measure of age, the median age of the population standardized for expected remaining years of life. The populations of developed nations such as Germany, Japan and the United States are growing older as measured by median ages, but in the near future they will experience periods in which they grow younger on this new measure, with implications for matters such as the cost of medical care, retirement and the accumulation of capital.

Date: 2005
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DOI: 10.1038/nature03593

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