On the longevity and extended health of Icarians, among others

Via the Washington Post I came across a 2012 article in The New York Times Magazine by Dan Buettner, "The Island Where People Forget to Die". In this article, Buettner highlights the longevity and good health of the inhabitants of Icaria, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea several dozen kilometres away from the Anatolian mainland where the average inhabitant can expect to live a decade longer than the average American. While many factors seem to contribute to the Icarians' situation--an abundance of exercise, a healthy diet, and so on--it seems that all these individual elements are reinforced by Icarian society as a whole.

In the United States, when it comes to improving health, people tend to focus on exercise and what we put into our mouths — organic foods, omega-3’s, micronutrients. We spend nearly $30 billion a year on vitamins and supplements alone. Yet in Ikaria and the other places like it, diet only partly explained higher life expectancy. Exercise — at least the way we think of it, as willful, dutiful, physical activity — played a small role at best.

Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy. In Okinawa, there’s none of this artificial punctuation of life. Instead, the notion of ikigai — “the reason for which you wake up in the morning” — suffuses people’s entire adult lives. It gets centenarians out of bed and out of the easy chair to teach karate, or to guide the village spiritually, or to pass down traditions to children. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term plan de vida to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. As Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, once told me, being able to define your life meaning adds to your life expectancy.

[. . .]

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

This message was emphasized by an 2013 article in The Guardian by Andrew Anthony, based at least in part on the author's interviews with Buettner.

The phrase "blue zone" was first coined by [author Dan] Buettner's colleague, the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain. "He was drawing blue circles on a map in Sardinia and then referring to the area inside the circle as the blue zone," Buettner says. "When we started working together, I extended it to Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. If you Google it now, it's entered the lexicon as a demographically confirmed geographical area where people live measurably longer." So what does it take to qualify? "It's a variation," Buettner says. "It's either the highest centenarian rate, so the most centenarians per 1,000. Or it has the highest life expectancy at middle age."

All the blue zones are slightly austere environments where life has traditionally required hard work. But they also tend to be very social, and none more so than Ikaria. At the heart of the island's social scene is a series of 24-hour festivals, known as paniyiri, which all age groups attend. They last right through the night and the centrepieces are mass dances in which everyone – teenagers, parents, the elderly, young children – takes part. Kostas Sponsas tells me he no longer has the energy to go on until dawn. He will now usually take his leave by 2am.

One evening, the island's star violin player, whom we met at Gregoris Tsahas's favourite cafe, invites Buettner, me and several others back to his house to hear him play. He says he often grows exhausted while performing at festivals, but the energy and enthusiasm of the people keep him going. He plays some traditional folk tunes, full of passion and yearning and heart-rending beauty, and mentions with pride that Mikis Theodorakis, the composer of Zorba The Greek, was among the leftists exiled on the island in the late 1940s. Theodorakis later recalled the experience with pleasure. "How could this be?" he asked. "The answer is simple: it's the beauty of the island in combination with the warmth of the locals. They risked their lives to be generous to us, something that helped us more than anything bear the burden of the hardship."

One of the things Buettner has found that unites the elderly inhabitants of all the blue zones is that they are unintentionally old: they didn't set out to extend their lives. "Longevity happened to these people," he says. "The centenarians didn't all of a sudden at 40 say, 'I'm going to become 100; I'm going to start getting exercise and eating these ingredients.' It ensues from their surroundings. So my argument is that the environmental components of places such as Ikaria are portable if you pay attention. And the value proposition in the real world is maybe a decade more life expectancy. It's not living to 100. But I think the real benefit is that the same things that yield this healthy longevity also yield happiness."

I ask a number of men in their 90s and 100s if they do any keep-fit exercise. The answer is always the same: "Yes, digging the earth." Nikos Fountoulis, for example, is a 93-year-old who looks 20 years younger. He still has a smallholding in the hills of the island's interior. Each morning he goes out at 8am to feed his animals and tend his garden. He used to dig charcoal as a younger man. "I never thought about getting old," he says. "I feel good. I feel 93, but on Ikaria that's OK."

Long-time readers of Demography Matters may remember that I visited the phenomenon of extended life expectancy and relatively gentle aging before, in a February 2010 post taking a look at the position and numbers of the aged in Abkhazia. Fantastic claims that Abkhazians regularly lived past the century mark have been debunked. Conversely, traditional Abkhazian culture does seem to have not only promoted good health, but helped integrate aging Abkhaz into their society in a way that allowed them to continue to be productive. (I know nothing about the current situation in Abkhazia. Anyone informed on this subject, please advise in the comments.)

Is it possible to learn from the lessons of Icarians and similar populations? Maybe. As commented in the articles I linked to above, Icarians' longevity appears to be the product of a complex mesh of social factors that can't be easily replicated. Whether the relaxed lifestyle of Icarians and others can be replicated in our contemporary world is very open to question, for instance. If nothing else, the Icarian experience does provide fascinating hints towards a possible futuree.

The Shortgage of Bulgarians Inside Bulgaria

Oh, there's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole......

Wenn der Beltz em Loch hat -
stop es zu meine liebe Liese
Womit soll ich es zustopfen -
mit Stroh, meine liebe Liese

According to Angela Merkel, speaking in the German city of Mainz in mid February,  European countries struggling with the fallout of the euro-area debt crisis have much to learn from East Germany’s experience with economic overhaul following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the main she was speaking about the need for reform, something on which we can all agree. “At the beginning of the 21st century", she said, "Germany was the sick man of Europe and that we are where we are today also has to do with reforms we carried out in the past. That’s why we can say in Europe that change can lead to good.”

But there was one tiny little detail she forgot to mention. During the post unification period East Germany's population went into melt-down mode. New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kulish put it like this:

Unemployment in the former East Germany remains double what it is in the west, and in some regions the number of women between the ages of 20 and 30 has dropped by more than 30 percent. In all, roughly 1.7 million people have left the former East Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, around 12 percent of the population, a continuing process even in the few years before the economic crisis began to bite.

And the population decline is about to get much worse, as a result of a demographic time bomb known by the innocuous-sounding name “the kink,” which followed the end of Communism. The birth rate collapsed in the former East Germany in those early, uncertain years so completely that the drop is comparable only to times of war, according to Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “For a number of years East Germans just stopped having children,” Dr. Klingholz said.

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported recently that although 14,000 young people would earn their high school diplomas this year in Saxony, only 7,500 would do so next year. Since 1989, about 2,000 schools have closed across the former East Germany because of a scarcity of children.

Now this situation is quite serious, and needs a long term solution, but it is not as serious as what is currently happening to Latvia, or Bulgaria, or a number of the other former communist states. Unless, of course, the lesson Angela would like to draw our attention to is that East Germany managed to salvage something from what would otherwise be population wreckage by sneaking in under the shelter of another state, with a centralized system of support for pensions and health care. Somehow I doubt it, but perhaps this is what we need to think more about. The EU needs a pan European health and pension system, to distribute the burden equitably. This is the conclusion I reached during my last visit to Riga. It isn't just a Euro related issue, it is to do with having a unified labour market, with people able to move to where the jobs exist, and the pay is better. For years people complained about the absence of labour mobility in the EU. Now we have it, the flaw in the institutional infrastructure is obvious.

Young people are moving from the weak economies on the periphery to the comparatively stronger ones in the core, or out of an ever older EU altogether. This has the simple consequence that the deficit issues in the core are reduced, while those on the periphery only get worse as health and pension systems become ever less affordable. Meanwhile, more and more young people follow the lead of Gerard Depardieu and look for somewhere where there isn't such a high fiscal burden, preferably where the elderly dependency ratio isn't shooting up so fast.

I am sufficiently concerned about this issue, which I think ultimately endangers possibilities of economic recovery all along the periphery, to have created a dedicated facebook page, campaigning for one single issue - that the EU Commission and the IMF give a greater priority to trying to measure these flows, and understand their consequences. I am simply asking that they pressure EU member states to improve their statistics gathering, treat the issue as a priority, and identify an indicator to incorporate in the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) Scoreboard. Really it doesn't matter whether you are in favour of austerity, or against it, feel more Keynesian than Austrian, or vice verse, all I am asking for is that this problem be taken more seriously, measured and studied.

Bulgaria The Classic Case?

Really there has been a before and after to the financial crisis, at least insofar as awareness of the demographic dimension is concerned. Really, before the onset of the crisis very few people really attached much importance to the question. Since the arrival of the European sovereign debt crisis, and the fiscal cliff debate in the United States, awareness has grown that population ageing probably will slow economic growth, and that previous expectations about levels of pension and health care provision may have been way too optimistic. The latest example of this has been Nobel Laureate Paul's Krugman's comments on how Japan's demographics may be influencing its growth rate. In a tellingly graphic expression he explains that the root of Japan's ailment might be that the country is suffering from a growing "shortage of Japanese".

Once you realise that population shortage may be a problem in Japan, you start  wondering where else it might be one. And then, once you begin to look you start seeing the issue springing up like mushrooms all over the place. In Bulgaria for example.

According to the 2011 census, Bulgaria has lost no less than 582,000 people over the last ten years. In a country of 7.3 million inhabitants this is a big deal. Further, it has lost a total of 1.5 million of its population since 1985, a record in depopulation not just for the EU, but also by global standards. The country, which had a population of almost nine million in 1985, now has almost the same number of inhabitants as in 1945 after World war II. And, of course, the decline continues.

As well as shrinking the population is ageing. In 2001 16.8% of the population were over 65. Just 10 years later the equivalent figure had risen  to 18.9%. Naturally this means the median population age is rising steadily. It is precisely part of my argument that this surge in median age over 40 has important consequences for saving and borrowing patterns at the aggregate level, patterns which have not yet been adequately measured and identified. Thus the macroeconomic dynamics of a country change. The impact of these changes has not yet been incorporated into the traditional models most analysts use in forecasting.

 Naturally the workforce itself is in rapid decline.

The causes of Bulgaria's rapid ageing and shrinking population problem are twofold, low fertility and emigration. This is what makes the country look more like the old DDR and less like Japan. In fact Bulgaria's situation is an extreme case of what is happening in many East European countries, especially Romania and the Baltics. If you want another reference point, Ukraine would be in this group, but even worse, since it is even outside the EU. 

Details of migrant numbers are scarce, and at best hedgy. The data we have is surely a significant underestimate, as the OECD pointed out in its latest country migration report:

Figures on declared emigration show an increase from 19 000 in 2009 to 27 700 in 2010. However, actual outflows are considered to be much greater, based on immigration statistics of th e main destination countries. Spain, the most important destination country in recent years, recorded 10 400 Bulgarians entering in 2010, 7% more than in 2009. Outflows of Bulgarian citizens from Spain also increased in 2010, to 7 600 from almost 5 000 in the previous year (+52%). The number of Bulgarians in Spain increased by 14 500 in 2010, and a further 13 000 in 2011. There are no consistent data for Greece, the second main destination of Bulgarian immigrants in recent years, but it seems that the stock increased less in 2010 than in previous years. 

Remittances data gathered by the World Bank give the general picture. Basically there was a large surge following the severe crisis of the late 1990s, and since that time the level of payments has only weakened slightly, on the back of the severity of the crisis in the main destination countries.

Bulgaria is also pretty much what the old DDR would look like if it hadn't fused with Western Germany, namely it much more similar to Hungary than it is to Japan (in the sense I discussed in this post) as it has a significant negative balance on the net international investment position (though not as large as Hungary's), which means as well as being quite poor it is totally unprepared for rapid population ageing (since the text book way to sustain pension and health benefits in a context of increasingly weaker headling GDP growth is normally thought to be to draw down on overseas assets).

Bulgaria  also bears comparison with Hungary for the way it has carried out a rapid correction on its external position. This is due largely to remittances and services exports, since the goods balance is still in deficit. But still, the turnround is impressive.

As elsewhere exports have performed very strongly.

But again to no real avail, since domestic demand is deflating so strongly that the economy struggles to find air...... and growth. In this sense it is hard to agree with the IMF Executive Directors when they state in their latest Public Information Notice, following conclusion of the Fund's 2012 Article IV consultation,  they "broadly agreed that the currency board arrangement has served Bulgaria well". If allowing a country to drift towards long term melt-down is doing well, I would hate to see what something which they thought was an impediment would do! Some thing is rotten in the state of Denmark, and that something isn't being identified or dealt with.

Naturally part of the problem is that the flow of credit has dried up.

But the other part is surely the one Krugman identified in Japan, the growing shortage of Japanese (sorry, Bulgarians). It is hard to see how you can get serious retail sales growth in a population that is shrinking so rapidly. The end result is that the economy grew steadily into the global crisis, and subsequently has stagnated. This stagnation isn't simply conjunctural anymore, it has become structural, as the decline in domestic demand associated with ongoing deleveraging and population ageing and shrinkage precisely offsets the positive impact of all that export growth.

Not everyone is convinced, of course. The IMF expect the Bulgarian economy to return to a rate of growth of between 3% and 4% after 2014, but looking at the demographics and comparing it with what we are seeing elsewhere that seems pretty unrealistic. What is the expression Christine Lagarde would use? "Wishful thinking" perhaps?

In any event, in the short term the country looks set to significantly underperform any such rosy expectations. FocusEconomics Consensus Forecast panellists expect the economy to expand 1.4% this year. In 2014, the panel expects economic growth to reach the impressive rate of 2.4%.

Growing Political Discontent

 Since Bulgaria is a small country, and a poor one to boot, most of the above had been going on virtually unnoticed by the rest of the world. Then last week the Bulgarian government suddenly resigned en bloc. The immediate cause of the crisis which lead to the resignation was  the continuing rise in energy costs, a rise which was largely blamed on the Czech provider CEZ. To appease the street protestors the government has now initiated a procedure to revoke the company's licence, a move which has started to raise concerns about institutional protection in the country.

According to the report in Bloomberg:

Bulgaria’s State Financial Inspection Agency started a probe into CEZ’s Bulgarian units last year and submitted a report on Feb. 8, saying that CEZ ‘‘evaded requirements of the Law for Public Tenders,” the Energy and Economy Ministry in Sofia said on Feb. 18. The ministry asked the authority to conduct a similar investigation into the local units of Austria’s EVN AG and Prague-based Energo-Pro, it said. Bulgaria sold seven power distributors in 2005 to EON SE, CEZ and EVN before joining the European Union. EON sold its Bulgarian companies to Energo-Pro in 2011.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas was not slow to respond:

“I regard the statements by Bulgarian officials about CEZ and other foreign companies as very non-standard and see the whole issue as highly politicized because of the approaching parliamentary elections,” Necas said. “I expect Bulgaria, as a member of the European Union, to stick to its international obligations, European law and its own laws on protection of foreign investments.”

Naturally energy prices are not the only issue. The population is tiring of austerity, and living standards that don't rise even as unemployment does.

One symptom of this is that Bulgaria's government sacked Finance Minister Simeon Djankov at the start of last week. Djankov was closely identified with austerity policies, and it isn't hard to read his departure as an attempt to curry favour with voters in elections which are due this summer.

Having said that, the country's government debt at under 14% of GDP is incredibly low, so there is room for flexibility, if it wasn't populist flexibility. The real issue is that simply spending more this year, or next, won't fix the underlying problem, and that problem is unlikely to be addressed until it is recognized as a problem by the institutions responsible for economic policy formulation. As someone once said, de-nile is not only a river in Egypt.

This post first appeared on my Roubini Global Economonitor Blog "Don't Shoot The Messenger".

Postcript

 According to wikipedia: "There's a Hole in My Bucket" (or "...in the Bucket") is a children's song, along the same lines as "Found a Peanut". The song is based on a dialogue about a leaky bucket between two characters, called Henry and Liza. The song describes a deadlock situation: Henry has got a leaky bucket, and Liza tells him to repair it. But to fix the leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs a knife. To sharpen the knife, he needs to wet the sharpening stone. To wet the stone, he needs water. However, when Henry asks how to get the water, Liza's answer is "in a bucket". It is implied that only one bucket is available — the leaky one, which, if it could carry water, would not need repairing in the first place.


The origin of this song seems to go back, oddly enough, to the German collection of songs known as the Bergliederbüchlein. Ironically Henry's Q&A with Liza fits the quandry facing the countries on Europe's periphery and their lack of constructive dialogue with their core peers about the roots of their problems to a tee.

On Guernsey's population control

Reading yesterday's Financial Times, I found the insert describing how the Channel Island of Guernsey with its financial sector was coping with the global financial crisis interesting. (It's doing well, apparently.) My curiosity was piqued by a passing mention that Guernsey had an official policy of limiting population. What, I wondered, was up with that?

Guernsey is an island with a land area of 78 square kilometres. As of March 2009, Guernsey (according to the government's 2009 Population Bulletin) had a total population of 62 274 people. Until recently, Guernsey's population history was one of slow growth (doubling from twenty to forty thousand from 1821 to 1901) followed by periods of decline and slow growth (growing from forty to forty-five thousand between 1901 and 1961). Migration tended to be emigration, nearly four thousand Channel Islanders settling in New Zealand in the late 19th century, for instance. With an economy historically dependent on agriculture, fishing, and long-distance trade, there was relatively little reason for anyone to stay and any number of pathways to leave.

This changed in the post-war era when Guernsey's government, like the government of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, began to promote the island as an off-shore financial sector. This succeeded enormously, making the island prosperous, with barely any unemployment and a history of sustained growth that has made this microstate one of the richest entities in the world. Guernsey's comparative advantage remains there, with things like online gambling and forays into information technology being promoted for alternatives, tourism and the primary sector declining (Guernsey retains a more diversified economy than Jersey, mind). This prosperity attracted immigrants, both people with professional skills and people wanting to take advantage of other areas of the labour market. Guernsey's age pyramid shows a decided imbalance towards men in the younger age groups.

The problem with immigration, as seen from the Guernsey perspective, is that Guernsey is already very densely populated. An increased population would impact negatively, it seems, on their perceived quality of life.

On one side of the argument are those islanders – I suspect they’re a big majority – who feel the island is already rather overcrowded. It’s not an issue of misanthropy or xenophobia but rather just a natural desire to live in a place with a bit of breathing space. Most islanders don’t want to become urban dwellers. Not even in an up market, city-state, surrounded by pretty bays and beautiful seascapes. The vision of Guernsey as “Hong Kong dans la Manches” is a nightmare for most locals and settlers alike.

Every time a few hundred more residents are added to the population it inevitably impacts on quality of life in the island. Not because the incomers aren’t thoroughly good sorts but just because its means more cars on our limited road system and more homes in a community where open space is already at a premium. It also puts more stress on our infrastructure – more water and electricity to be supplied, more educational and healthcare needs, not forgetting more rubbish to be disposed of.

So there is a strong qualitative case for ending Guernsey’s historic trend of steady population growth which has gone on unabated, bar a couple of blips, since the island’s first census in 1821 showed a population of just 20,302. The $64,000 question is how?

The key element to date in Guernsey's population control strategy is to strictly regulate housing. Most housing on the island is strictly licensed, and migrants fall into two categories, those who have essential skills and can settle with their families for extended periods of time, and those who don't.

Is it working? Slow population growth is continuing notwithstanding these regulations, and--perhaps--a shift away from traditional sectors of the economy like horticulture dependent on unskilled workers. The restricted talent pool, is making many businesses favour greater flexibility--the Chamber of Commerce would like to see more flexibility, growth or (less likely) decline of up to 10%. The aging of Guernsey's population, meanwhile, will create more problems.

[Consultant Greg] Yeoman said forecasts had predicted that by 2040, the number of people aged 65-84 would have nearly doubled and that those aged over 85 would have gone up by 150%, meaning the island’s dependency ratio will have increased by 64% from 0.48 to 0.79.

‘There will be an insufficient labour pool to support diverse business growth,’ said Mr Yeoman.

‘People are struggling to fill these positions now, so imagine how much harder it will be if we have 7,000 fewer in our working population.’

He said the offshoot of this would be hugely problematic, with an explosion in the cost of providing health and social care and the unsustainability of the States pension given as just two examples.

Based on my own personal and other history with small islands, I'm used to the idea that emigration is the major problem. Coming up against Guernsey with the reverse was a thought-provoking experience.

Philip Longman on global aging

Over at Foreign Policy, demographer Philip Longman presents a basic overview for that magazine's readers about aging: its scope, its presence in the Third World, its heavy impact in Asia, and so on. Readers of this blog might be interested in his summary. Me, I was interested in his essay's conclusion.

The connection between a society's wealth and its demographics is cyclical. At first, with fertility declining and the workforce aging, there are proportionately fewer children to raise and educate. This is good: It frees up female labor to join the formal economy and allows for greater investment in the education of each remaining child. All else being equal, both factors stimulate economic development. Japan went through this phase in the 1960s and 1970s, with the other Asian countries following close behind. China is benefiting from it now.

Then, however, the outlook turns bleak. Over time, low birth rates lead not only to fewer children, but also to fewer working-age people just as the percentage of dependent elders explodes. This means that as population aging runs its course, it might well go from stimulating the economy to depressing it. Fewer young adults means fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture, and the like, as well as fewer people likely to take entrepreneurial risks. Aging workers become more interested in protecting existing jobs than in creating new businesses. Last-ditch efforts to prop up consumption and home values may result in more and more capital flowing into expanded consumer credit, creating financial bubbles that inevitably burst (sound familiar?).

In other words, a planet that grays indefinitely is clearly asking for trouble. But birth rates don't have to plummet forever. One path forward might be characterized as the Swedish road: It involves massive state intervention designed to smooth the tensions between work and family life to enable women to have more children without steep financial setbacks. But so far, countries that have followed this approach have achieved only very modest success. At the other extreme is what might be called the Taliban road: This would mean a return to "traditional values," in which women have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood. This mindset may well maintain high birth rates, but with consequences that today are unacceptable to all but the most rigid fundamentalists.

So is there a third way? Yes, though we aren't quite sure how to get there. The trick will be restoring what, in the days of family-owned farms and small businesses, was once true: that babies are an asset rather than a burden. Imagine a society in which parents get to keep more of the human capital they form by investing in their children. Imagine a society in which the family is no longer just a consumer unit, but a productive enterprise. The society that figures out how to restore the economic foundation of the family will own the future. The alternative is poor and gray indeed.

The wholesale shift towards family enterprises that Longman predicts doesn't strike me as a likely solution to subreplacement fertility. The emergence of cultural norms and economic and political institutions which allow people to form families of various kinds without penalties or stigma, perhaps with the addition of new reproductive technologies to facilitate reproduction for longer periods of time and despite various problems, is the way to go. What do you think?

Some speculations on the effects of significantly extended lifespans

((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.

On the developed world's cohorts of future centenarians

When blogger James Nicoll linked to this Guardian report suggesting, after The Lancet, that "50% of Britons born now will see their century," he did so using the link label: "Experts warn of nightmarish future filled with healthy and productive old people."

Sarah Boseley's article reports that the researches of Kaare Christensen et al., recently published in The Lancet, suggest the majority of children born in economically developed nations are likely to live at least to the age of 100.

Professor Kaare Christensen and colleagues at the ageing research centre at the University of Southern Denmark calculate that at least half the babies born in the UK in the year 2000 will reach their 100th birthday. Life expectancy is increasing so fast that half the babies born in 2007 will live to be at least 103, while half the Japanese babies born in the same year will reach the age of 107.

The bad news is that the ageing populations of rich countries such as the UK threaten to unbalance the population. It "poses severe challenges for the traditional social welfare state," write Christensen and colleagues.

But they have a radical solution: young and old should work fewer hours a week. Over a lifetime, we would all spend the same total amount of time at work as we do now, but spread out over the years.

"The 20th century was a century of redistribution of income. The 21st century could be a century of redistribution of work," they write. "Redistribution would spread work more evenly across populations and over the ages of life. Individuals could combine work, education, leisure and child rearing in varying amounts at different ages."

It is a theory that is beginning to receive "some preliminary attention", the authors say, citing a study in the Science journal three years ago which suggested that shorter working weeks would help young people and increase western Europe's flagging birth rate.

Shorter working weeks might further increase health and life expectancy, Christensen and colleagues write. But redistribution of work will not solve all the problems caused by a society with a large number of very old people. Beyond a certain point, the old will need younger people to look after them – although technology is likely to provide some help in advanced countries such as the UK.

The growth in life expectancy, Christensen argues, was driven until the 1920s by declines in infant and maternal mortality, then by continuing and sustained improvements in old-age mortality.

The Danish authors say they see no reason why life expectancy should not continue to rise. "The linear increase in record life expectancy for more than 165 years does not suggest a looming limit to human lifespan," they write. "If life expectancy was approaching a limit, some deceleration of progress would probably occur. Continued progress in the longest-living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit, and further rise in life expectancy seems likely."

At this point, it's legitimate to recall the Greek myth of Tithonus, a Trojan prince whose lover Eos asked Zeus on his behalf that he be given the gift of immortality, but forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. There's no reason to think that poor health and social isolation must necessarily be the case for this new class of elderly, however.

The analysis suggests, however, that the health of the elderly is improving. Studies have rarely looked at people over 85, but improvements in their health are likely to translate into improvements also for the very elderly.

Although the number of cancers is rising as people live longer, and chronic diseases such as diabetes and arthritis are increasing, better diagnosis and treatment means that people can live good lives in spite of them. Obesity is expected to cause more health problems, but its consequences can be modified by the use of drugs.

Christensen has some suggestions of his own, and looks forward to new research that might isolate the various genetic and environmental factors behind extended lifespans. Population aging will cause problems, even if people who live very long remain fairly productive throughout their final years, but whatever helps.

Global Population Ageing - What Do We Know?

Update 1: I have added a comment below by Warren Sanderson who is one of the co-authors of the paper discussed below. It was first posted over on my personal blog where this entry has been up for a couple of days.

Update 2: Just to remind our readers (if they had not discovered it themselves) that there is a very interesting discussion unfolding in the post by Aslak about the correlation between higher overall fertility and non-marital births.

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In this enty I am going to plug a recent paper on global ageing [1] by Wolfgang Lutz Warren C. Sanderson, and Sergei Scherbov published in the brand new journal, Journal of Population Ageing, edited by the team of demographers, Sarah Harper and George Leeson, at the Oxford institute of Ageing (Oxford University). Also, this would naturally be a nice occasion to ever so slowly reveal what I am arguing in the context of my own research; research which is naturally heavily affected by the likes of Lutz, Malmberg, Lee, McDonald and other of our time's great (econ)-demographers. [Graphs are made by the author and not taken from Lutz et al.]

With respect to Lutz et al they set out to grapple with one of the most difficult issues in the context of demographics and ageing in the form of our ability to forecast the future trends of ageing in the context of the global economy and different regions. The main conclusions indicate a rapid and, in some cases, accelerating process of population ageing in a global context in the next decades as well as a the very likely outcome that global population growth will cease to exist as a lingering phenomenon in the century which follows. Here is their abstract;

Population ageing is, in the first instance, a demographic phenomenon; although its consequences go far beyond demography. But the future trends of ageing are not yet known and many of the consequences of ageing will depend on the future speed and extent of ageing. Here we summarize what is already known and what is not yet known about future ageing trends in different parts of the world. We do this through the means of new probabilistic population forecasts. The section ‘New Regional and Global Probabilistic Population Forecasts’ presents the results of those forecasts. They confirm the earlier finding (Lutz et al., Nature, 412(6846), 543–545, 2001a) that it is highly likely that the world’s population growth will come to the end during this century. The following four sections present results for proportions of populations 60+, old age dependency ratios, proportions 80+ and average ages. In the section ‘New Measures of Ageing’, we analyse a new measure of ageing that takes life expectancy changes into account.

The first question which immediately springs to mind (or at least it did to me) is first and foremost what kind of techniques the authors are using in their endeavors to actually make forecasts on a variable as complex as ageing and so far into the future. Well, this is also where water gets muddied since it is important to realize, a priori, the amount of uncertainty which are attached to the kind of exercise Lutz et al. embark on. As most of you will know ageing is driven by the joint process of declining fertility and increasing life expectancy (and to some extent migration) and once we use this break down to operationalize ageing it gets dreadfully difficult to forecast although there are tentative conclusions which can be drawn based on existing evidence. In this way, it is important to dwell at the main conclusion, namely that the world as a whole is set to age rapidly before heading off into more specific forecasts.

The formal technique used by Lutz et al. is probabilistic forecasting which is basically a technique of collecting random draws from existing data on fertility, mortality and migration in order to produce a series of potential distributions and paths which can ageing can take as we move forward. Lutz et al. center on five simulations. The first in the context of total population size, the second on the proportion of people aged 60+, the third focuses on dependency ratios, the fourth turns the attention to the proportion of people aged 80+ and the final simulation centers on average age.

In relation to the first simulation which focuses on population growth it appears certain that the global population will continue to grow up until 2030-2050 depending on the path you look at. Beyond that point the simulations become extremely insecure ranging from a continuation of population growth to a decline in population growth which will restore the global population level at its 2000 level in the year 2100. Needless to say that such exercises are largely pointless from the point of view of inference about e.g. economic effects. However, what seems to survive as a main conclusion is that it is very likely that the tendency of population growth will come to an end some time during the next century, something which is significant in its own right in a world where the discourse on global warming, in my opinion, risks to engender policy advice to emerging economies which are essentially ill informed.

With respect to the paper in general I take away the following points in random order.

• The potential importance of migration. In this regard, it is worthwhile to have a look at the simulated path for population growth (and thus in some sense the change in age structure) for Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. As many of you will have guessed the former shows a steady decline (rapid ageing) from 2010 and onwards whereas the latter is set to increase (in all probability) towards the year 2050 (and beyond). Although uncertainty remains it is undoubtedly true that in a world of complete equalization of factor returns and with no barriers (of any kind!) to labor flows a lot of the detrimental impacts from ageing could be mitigated. Having said this though, I still want to emphasise the importance of managing the transition in an emerging market context since all evidence points towards a much more rapid move towards below replacement levels once economic development sets in. In short, population managment policies need to look at both sides of the coin.

• A rapid increase in the proportion of 60+. Perhaps this is the most striking aspect of the coming process of ageing and whether we concur with the actual forecasts, there is no doubt that the change in age structure measured as an increasingly large share of, in this case, people aged 60+ is going to be extraordinary. According to Lutz et al. by 2040 the probability of the entire of Europe (CEE+Russia), Japan/Oceania as well as China having more than a third of its population aged 60+ is over 80%. This raises some extremely important important questions which researchers are only now starting to focus on. What happens to the labour supply of people in the 60s-70s? How does the life cycle of the young adjust to the skewed age distribution and what about that of the "old"? How should life expectancy be calibrated into the issue of raising retirement age for this growing age group? What happens to the productivity profile of society? And of course, my favorite; how will these changes be transmitted through capital flows both in a time series perspective (i.e. for the individual economy) as well as of course in a cross sectional perspective where the fact that all surpluses and deficits must add up act as a decisive binding constraint on the ability of some economies to smooth consumption and investment optimally.

• The analysis on old age dependency (60+/20-59) ratio mirrors the points above to a large extent, but leafing through some of the tentative conclusions e.g. in the context of Japan and China I am pretty amazed, if not scared, by the projections. Especially, in the context of the former some of the projected paths would quite literally mean that the market economy (with associated welfare structures) will cease to exist. The interesting thing about the latter (China) is of course that for all the hopes about China ascending to take over the baton of the US as the sole global leader, most people are missing the fact that the country, in all likelihood, is going to catch up (and surpass) large parts of the OECD in terms of ageing as soon as the 2020-2025 mark.

• Turning the attention to the forecasted share of people aged 80+ my own opinion is that this is pretty useless. I mean, I salute the effort but as the authors themselves point out; once we incorporate the long time horizons (up to 2100!) and most importantly the extreme uncertainty surrounding future mortality evolutions for this age group (both in terms of life expectancy at birth as well as on a cumulative basis for the people alive today) the uncertainty takes on huge proportions. What we know naturally is that the number will increase substantially, but also that it is likely to do so following a concave function of time as one would assume the extra gain in life expectancy gets smaller. [2].

Now, as Lutz et al never tire of pointing out throughout their excursion into the world of forecasting population ageing, this is all very uncertain and for two reasons primarily. Firstly, there is the inherent uncertainty associated with forecasting and essentially mapping changes in fertility, mortality, and migration. Secondly, there is the effect from moving the goal posts, or in this case; the reference points in relation to ageing. The simple point here is that it is not certain that old will mean the same thing tomorrow as it does today. This is especially the case of course if mortality continues to decline.

If this concludes the look on the paper by Lutz et al. I think it is worthwhile to produce something of an apology. Consequently, I have on several occasions pointed towards the futility (and in some cases stupidity) of narrating demographic changes in the context of what might and might not happen once the calendar shows 2050. Yet, here I even venture something about the state of affairs in the year 2100. An explanation is in order I think.

First of all, I maintain my view that the most important issue with respect to population ageing is the period one or two decades forward in time. Even if we might be able to plausibly say something interesting about ageing beyond this point the economic effects from ageing are correspondingly almost impossible to map. One good example here is the supposed asset meltdown scenario which is supposed to hit us in 2040-2050 as the weight of older age cohort's dissaving pushes up real interest interests and floods the market with assets (i.e. disinvestment) for which there is not a significant amount of takers. Not only do researchers only scantly understand what is actually meant by dissaving, there is also reason to believe that although optimal from an individual's life cycle perspective dissaving is not optimal from the point of view of an ageing society writ large [3].

With this general point in mind it is also worth recognizing a fundamental pre-requisite for focusing on ageing, namely the fact that the demographic transition is not over. It is ongoing and given the fact that the coming age of ageing which was initiated somewhere in the late 1960s (in the context of the OECD) it means that fertility will not stabilize at replacement levels. Despite the obvious reality of this point and the subsequent need to adjust models, views and analyses accordingly many still assume for example that global fertility, by some form of magic, is imbued with a drift parameter that will take it to replacement levels in the year 2100. Let me state as clearly that I can that such assumptions are completely useless. Interestingly and as a short digression, demographers have been focusing on this for quite some time and although the people at the UN, arguably, are getting better I would still recommend anyone interested in this to go back to the seminal volume edited by Jones et al and look up the chapter by Demeny where he ties the UN Population projections, of the time, up in knots. He essentially rams home the point that replacement fertility constitutes, in his own words, an implausible endpoint of the demographic transition; a point John C. Caldwell made already in the beginning of the 1980s. Whoever made the point first, this is extraordinarily important to take aboard.

In fact, I would take all this a step further.

In most modern accounts of the demographic transitions the traditional process is amended by an additional phase, or transition if you will, called the second demographic transition Van de Kaa (2002)[4] (or phase of ageing Lee (2003)). Now, I tend to take a more drastic approach. Quite simply I think that the transition need to be revamped all together and that a focus on ageing and age structure should be adopted at the offset. In this sense I think that Malmberg and Sommestad (2000) is a very important starting point since this the most comprehensive contribution which maps the whole transition in the context of ageing (specifically using Sweden). Working from this I believe that we can narrate the demographic transition in a way which makes it much more likely for us to use it to make inferences on economic processes which is ultimately my goal even if the study of demographics is a fascinating area in itself.

With respect to the question implicitly posed by Lutz et al. and thus how much we actually know about the global and regional process of ageing the initial answer has to be that we know quite a bit. Most importantly, you have to remember that ageing is not a new phenomenon and as I would argue a lingering aspect of the entire transition. The key is what happens next to mortality, fertility and migration and here uncertainty is vast although I should stress yet again that idea of convergence towards homoestasis in which these parameters are constant is not a desirable way to look at demographic processes. If we want to model this and if we want to make solid economic inference we need to take into account a myriad of feedback loops as well as the path dependency of the transition. With this end point it is perhaps apt to recall Socrates who reminded us of the fact that knowing that one knows nothing or very little is actually knowing quite a bit.

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For more on population ageing, the Economist had an interesting briefing on the issue a couple of weeks ago which touches on some of the same points as above and provides some nice examples and cases. Finally, I also think that I should plus Georg Magnus' book the Age of Ageing which is really also a nice introduction for the intermediate laymen. In terms of academic papers that offers a general introduction to the issue of modern population dynamics and ageing Lee (2003) is a must, but also this paper by David S. Reher is very good (I discuss the paper here). Hopefully, I will have my own contribution to offer soon which sets the demographic transition in the context of economics and how it should understood in order to best make the connection to the study of economic phenomena.

List of References

Harper, Sarah and Howse, Kenneth (2009) - An Upper Limit to Human Longevity?, Journal of Population Ageing, Vol 1, issue 2.

Jones, Gavin W; Douglas, Robert M; Caldwell, John C; and D'Souza, Rennie M (1997) - The Continuing Demographic Transition, Clarendon Press Oxford; chapter 5, Replacement Level Fertility: The Implausible End Point of the Demographic Transition, Paul Demeny.

Magnus, George (2008) - The Age of Ageing, Wiley

Malmberg, Bo and Lena, Sommestad (2000) – Four Phases of the Demographic Transition, ”Implications for Economic and Social Development in Sweden 1820-2000” Arbetsrapport/Institut för Framtidsstudier; 2000:6. The paper was presented at the SSHA meeting in Pittsburg. October 2000.

Lee, Ronald (2003) – The Demographic Transition – Three Centuries of Fundamental Change, Journal of Economic Perspectives vol.17 issue 4, pp. 167-190 fall 2003

Lutz, Wolfgang; Sanderson, Warren C; and Scherbov Sergei (2008) - Global and Regional Population Ageing - How Certain Are we of its Dimensions, Journal of Population Ageing vol 1, issue 1. '

Reher, David S (2007) - Towards long-term population decline: a discussion of relevant issues, European Journal of Population

Van de Kaa, Dirk J. (2002) – The Idea of a Second Demographic Transition in Industrialised Countries, National Institute of Population and Social Security, Tokyo, Japan 29 January 2002

Notes

[1] - The paper is walled for non-subscribers, and I can't of course upload a version here, but mail me and we can discuss the paper "further" if you like ...

[2] - Although it should be noted here that in a recent literature survey on human longevity by Sarah Harper and Kenneth Howse evidence is provided, from Japan, that mortality shows no sign of "compression" at older ages which indicate a linear rather than a concave function.

[3] - I will have much more about this in my next posts where I respond to this.

[4] - The idea of the SDT dates back to the 1980s and earlier works by Van de Kaa as well as Boongaarts.