((I know that this post is speculative, almost absurdly so. Bear with me.)
The idea of radically extending human life expectancy has been surfacing more and more in the media over the past few years. Back in October, I made a brief note about recent projections by demographers that, taking ongoing improvements in medicine into account, most of the children now being born in developed countries may become centenarians. The ongoing increase in human life expectancy is one of the biggest if quietest ongoing revolutions in the world, as medicine is slowly making any number of human ailments, from cancer to HIV/AIDS to the slow degeneration of the human form, treatable illnesses, while other non-medical ways of increasing the human lifespan (through caloric restriction, as an example) also show promise. In the Greek myth of Tithonus, that Trojan prince's lover Eos asked Zeus on his behalf that he be given the gift of immortality, which Tithonus did receive, but forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. It looks very much like the coming generation of human beings will not only enjoy longer lifespans but healthier lifespans as well.
Demographics come into play here via Ira Rososfky at his Psychology Today blog, where he recently posed an interesting question: "[W]hat if science advanced to the point where life expectancy took a quantum leap or we became immortal? How would we cope with all those 200 and 300-year-old people?" In an earlier post, Rosofsky wondered whether a doubling of human life expectancy would make people self-protective to the point of paranoia. If humans gained relatively immunity from the aging process but not from "accidental illness or infectious diseases," Rosofsky wondered, might humans try to avoid taking any risks at all?
Would individuals avoid contact with others for fear of illness? Would we all remove ourselves to reclusive existences living in the equivalent of a nursing home with padded walls and floors and grab bars so we could never fall and hit our heads?
Would agoraphobia become a fact of life along with paranoia and hypochondria?
I mean, if you know your life is going to be a brief candle of only seventy or eighty years, you might say: "Heck, life is short, so what difference does it make if I take some chances?"
I know you could argue that a short life should actually make us more self-protective, but consider how you would feel knowing that if you died accidentally at seventy you could be missing out on more than one-hundred years of additional life? That's where madness and paranoia might lie.
I'd argue that such paranoia isn't very different from what people experience today. Regardless, if the numbers of the (perhaps healthily and normally) superaged steadily grew, what would happen to the age pyramid, to economies, to the environment? One scientist, Leonid Gavrilov, has argued that limits to life expectancy are probabilistic rather than deterministic, and that despite lengthened lifespans populations need not rise substantially.
Psychological consequences aside, Leonid Gavrilov, in "Demographic consequences of defeating aging," (presented at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Conference, Queens' College, Cambridge, England, September, 2009) asks: "Is it possible to have a sustainable population dynamics in a future hypothetical non-aging society?"
In computer simulations, Gavrilov concluded that "population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 50-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 50), the total population increases by 35 percent only (from 9.1 to 13.3 million)."
Paradoxically, the population might even decline "if some members of the society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.)."
Immortal parents, if they had only one child per couple, would double the population over time. The population would not grow infinitely.
"In other words, a population of immortal reproducing organisms can grow indefinitely in time, but not necessarily indefinitely in size, because asymptotic growth is possible," Gavrilov said in an interview with Rejuvenation Research (Volume 12, Number 5, 2009).
"The startling conclusion is that fears of overpopulation based on lay common sense and uneducated intuition are, in fact, grossly exaggerated."
He adds: "In brief, we found that defeating aging, the joy of parenting, and sustainable population size are not mutually exclusive. This is an important point, because it can change the current public perception that life extension necessarily leads to overpopulation."
Much depends on the nature of fertility in this brave new world. If it's possible for people to become parents for a longer period of time--if reproductive organs retain their potency for longer, or if some technological combination like cloning and artificial wombs comes about--then their might be a longer window of fertility. Given the current tendency for fertility to be postponed, this might well allow replacement fertility to be reached even in societies marked by lowest-low fertility.
One thing's for certain: if human lifespans are significantly extended, especially but not only if working lifespans are extended, the pensions systems currently existing will be almost absurdly unaffordable. If people could continue to retire in a particular country at (say) 65, while lifespans amounted to (say) 120 years and people would be sufficiently healthy to work to 100, barring unimaginably huge increases in productivity pensions specifically and social security systems generally would need to be massively revised.
Thoughts? As I said at the beginning, this is an absurdly speculative post, but I'd be interested to see what you'd think of the situation. Don't worry: there's going to be a purely non-speculative post on this subject tomorrow.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Some more links
Saturday, January 30, 2010
On Russia's brief population increase
Russia's demographic profile since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been notoriously grim, with terrifically high mortality combining with terribly low birth rates to produce a rate of natural decrease that even considerable immigration couldn't compensate for. Until now.
Russia has registered the first population increase since the chaotic years which followed the fall of the Soviet Union, bucking a long-term decline that has dampened economic growth projections, officials said on Tuesday.
Russia's population increased by between 15,000 and 25,000 to more than 141.9 million in 2009, the first annual increase since 1995, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova told a meeting in the Kremlin with President Dmitry Medvedev.
The rise was helped by a 4 percent decline in mortality rates and an influx of immigrants, mostly from the former republics of the former Soviet Union, Golikova said.
"The difference between birth rates and mortality rates will be covered by a rise in migration," Golikova said in a televised Kremlin meeting, adding that Russia was trying to cut the number of abortions.
"Our abortion rates are comparable to birth rates," she said. Russia registered 1.7 million births in 2009 and 1.2 million abortions.
In addition, as the Population Reference Bureau's Carl Haub noted, births have risen even as mortality has fallen.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has long advocated a rise in Russia’s very low birth rate. In 2007, with his bidding, the government took the dramatic step of providing women with a $9,000 payment for the birth of a second child. The incentive certainly seems to have worked. In 2007, births jumped nearly 9 percent over 2006 and, in 2008, by 6.4 percent over 2007. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at 1.49 (2008), up from its nadir of 1.16 in 1999.
[. . .]
Official demographic data have been released by the state statistical bureau, GOSKOMSTAT, for January 2009 through November (Russia releases vital statistics very quickly). Those show an increase in births for the January-November 2009 period of 2.8 percent, lower than the previous two years but still an increase. At the same time, deaths dropped by 3.7 percent so that natural decrease, birth minus deaths, was “only” -224,310. I say only because that figure was an astounding -958,000 in 2000. So for population to grow in 2009, net international migration will have to offset that -224,310. That certainly seems to be well within reach since net immigration from January to October was reported as 210,446, much of it from Central Asia and other former Soviet republics which the Russians often refer to as the “near abroad.” Based on typical migration patterns in Russia in November and December, about 250,000 net immigration can be expected.
Russia has thus moved into the territory of countries like Germany, Spain, or Italy, where natural decrease in the native-born population is countered by immigration. This is a good thing.
Will this last? Almost certainly not. Leaving aside the possibility that the cash payments, instead of encouraging women to be mothers to more children, actually encouraged them to have the children they were planning on having early, the birth rate's increase is the product of the women born in the last two decades of the Soviet Union. As this 1996 RAND survey points out, well into the 1980s the population of the modern-day Russian Federation exhibited TFRs well in excess of western Europe, hovering around replacement. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a sharp fall in birth rates and this, noted in the St. Petersburg Times, has sharply reduced the numbers of potential mothers.
The number of children under 18 has fallen to 26.5 million now from 38 million in 1995 and 33.5 million in 2000, according to a new report by UNICEF and the State Statistics Service.
“For historical and demographic reasons, the child population in Russia decreased by approximately 12 million over the last 13 years. This is an average of 1 million each year,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s representative in Russia.
“This in itself poses important development challenges, and optimizing the investment in childhood makes it even more important and urgent for the country,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
[. . .]
“There were a lot of babies born in the 1980s but few in the 1990s, and now we can see the result of the decline,” said Anatoly Vishnevsky, head of the Demography Institute at the Higher School of Economics.
“Later the birth rate started to increase, but not by much,” he added.
Since the number of children is now low, the birth rate will not be able to increase for the next two decades, he said.
“The number of children might increase, but not significantly,” Vishnevsky said, adding that there will not be enough women for reproduction.
The effect, Haub notes, is extreme.
Russia’s age-sex pyramid took a body blow during the period of high natural decrease. The number of young people moving up the age ladder into the prime childbearing ages is much less than those now in the childbearing years. As of January 1, 2009, there were 6.2 million females in the age group 20-24. The 15-19 age group was only 4.5 million and both the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups taken together totaled 6.5 million. As those younger age groups begin childbearing, births will certainly decline even if the TFR rises. Beyond that, deaths will rise as the elderly population grows significantly in size.
This drop has had a dramatic effect already, on the size of student populations for instance.
While the number of first graders rose from 1.25 million in 2007 to 1.39 million in 2009 — the first increase in 12 years in 2009 — the overall number of high school students almost halved from 20.6 million in 1998 to 13.3 million last year.
The number of high school graduates fell from 1.25 million in 1998 to 900,000 in 2009 and is expected to drop to 700,000 in 2012.
As a consequence, university student numbers are expected to drop from the current 7.5 million to 4 million in the 2012-13 school year.
There just aren't enough Russian women to compensate for this shortfall. Accordingly, Russia's population will soon resume its natural decrease, if at a gentler pace than in the bad days of old. If: There's no telling what migration would do to complicate matters. If Russia stopped attracting immigrants and instead became a major source of immigrants, things could change sharply for the worse.
Russia has registered the first population increase since the chaotic years which followed the fall of the Soviet Union, bucking a long-term decline that has dampened economic growth projections, officials said on Tuesday.
Russia's population increased by between 15,000 and 25,000 to more than 141.9 million in 2009, the first annual increase since 1995, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova told a meeting in the Kremlin with President Dmitry Medvedev.
The rise was helped by a 4 percent decline in mortality rates and an influx of immigrants, mostly from the former republics of the former Soviet Union, Golikova said.
"The difference between birth rates and mortality rates will be covered by a rise in migration," Golikova said in a televised Kremlin meeting, adding that Russia was trying to cut the number of abortions.
"Our abortion rates are comparable to birth rates," she said. Russia registered 1.7 million births in 2009 and 1.2 million abortions.
In addition, as the Population Reference Bureau's Carl Haub noted, births have risen even as mortality has fallen.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has long advocated a rise in Russia’s very low birth rate. In 2007, with his bidding, the government took the dramatic step of providing women with a $9,000 payment for the birth of a second child. The incentive certainly seems to have worked. In 2007, births jumped nearly 9 percent over 2006 and, in 2008, by 6.4 percent over 2007. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at 1.49 (2008), up from its nadir of 1.16 in 1999.
[. . .]
Official demographic data have been released by the state statistical bureau, GOSKOMSTAT, for January 2009 through November (Russia releases vital statistics very quickly). Those show an increase in births for the January-November 2009 period of 2.8 percent, lower than the previous two years but still an increase. At the same time, deaths dropped by 3.7 percent so that natural decrease, birth minus deaths, was “only” -224,310. I say only because that figure was an astounding -958,000 in 2000. So for population to grow in 2009, net international migration will have to offset that -224,310. That certainly seems to be well within reach since net immigration from January to October was reported as 210,446, much of it from Central Asia and other former Soviet republics which the Russians often refer to as the “near abroad.” Based on typical migration patterns in Russia in November and December, about 250,000 net immigration can be expected.
Russia has thus moved into the territory of countries like Germany, Spain, or Italy, where natural decrease in the native-born population is countered by immigration. This is a good thing.
Will this last? Almost certainly not. Leaving aside the possibility that the cash payments, instead of encouraging women to be mothers to more children, actually encouraged them to have the children they were planning on having early, the birth rate's increase is the product of the women born in the last two decades of the Soviet Union. As this 1996 RAND survey points out, well into the 1980s the population of the modern-day Russian Federation exhibited TFRs well in excess of western Europe, hovering around replacement. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a sharp fall in birth rates and this, noted in the St. Petersburg Times, has sharply reduced the numbers of potential mothers.
The number of children under 18 has fallen to 26.5 million now from 38 million in 1995 and 33.5 million in 2000, according to a new report by UNICEF and the State Statistics Service.
“For historical and demographic reasons, the child population in Russia decreased by approximately 12 million over the last 13 years. This is an average of 1 million each year,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s representative in Russia.
“This in itself poses important development challenges, and optimizing the investment in childhood makes it even more important and urgent for the country,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
[. . .]
“There were a lot of babies born in the 1980s but few in the 1990s, and now we can see the result of the decline,” said Anatoly Vishnevsky, head of the Demography Institute at the Higher School of Economics.
“Later the birth rate started to increase, but not by much,” he added.
Since the number of children is now low, the birth rate will not be able to increase for the next two decades, he said.
“The number of children might increase, but not significantly,” Vishnevsky said, adding that there will not be enough women for reproduction.
The effect, Haub notes, is extreme.
Russia’s age-sex pyramid took a body blow during the period of high natural decrease. The number of young people moving up the age ladder into the prime childbearing ages is much less than those now in the childbearing years. As of January 1, 2009, there were 6.2 million females in the age group 20-24. The 15-19 age group was only 4.5 million and both the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups taken together totaled 6.5 million. As those younger age groups begin childbearing, births will certainly decline even if the TFR rises. Beyond that, deaths will rise as the elderly population grows significantly in size.
This drop has had a dramatic effect already, on the size of student populations for instance.
While the number of first graders rose from 1.25 million in 2007 to 1.39 million in 2009 — the first increase in 12 years in 2009 — the overall number of high school students almost halved from 20.6 million in 1998 to 13.3 million last year.
The number of high school graduates fell from 1.25 million in 1998 to 900,000 in 2009 and is expected to drop to 700,000 in 2012.
As a consequence, university student numbers are expected to drop from the current 7.5 million to 4 million in the 2012-13 school year.
There just aren't enough Russian women to compensate for this shortfall. Accordingly, Russia's population will soon resume its natural decrease, if at a gentler pace than in the bad days of old. If: There's no telling what migration would do to complicate matters. If Russia stopped attracting immigrants and instead became a major source of immigrants, things could change sharply for the worse.
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