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Unit 5 Social Change
Chapter 16
Enrichment Reading Life Expectancy: Surprising
Demographic Trends
by David Stipp
Baby boomers have ushered in most every major trend over the past 50 years. But it was their grandparents
who initiated the most radical demographic change of the past half-century—a dramatic de- cline in death rates at older ages. In fact, about the time boomers were rambunctiously burning draft cards, their elders quietly began nullifying actuarial tables. By 1990 there were more than 1.5 million Americans age 85 and over who wouldn’t have been alive if death rates had stayed at the 1960 level.
Extrapolating this trend, demographer James Vaupel has made a bold prediction: Half of the girls and a third of the boys recently born in the developed world will live to be 100. Vaupel similarly expects millions of former flower chil- dren to defy federal population forecasts and make good on their old chant, “Hell no, we won’t go!”—he has projected there could be nearly 37 million boomers age 85 and over by 2050, more than twice the government’s best guess. That would mean a much higher propor- tion of senior citizens nationwide than Florida has today. . . .
Vaupel [is] no shallow visionary. A few years ago many of his colleagues scoffed when he challenged a grim canon about aging. It holds that death rates rise exponentially with age in adult animals, including humans—the older you are, the theory goes, the more likely you are to die. Aided by other researchers, he marshaled data on everything from Swedish women to Medflies to show it ain’t so; for good measure, he
threw in supporting data on the death rates of old cars. The team demonstrated that mortality can plateau and, strangely, even drop among the very old—as if the Fates were nodding off after a long wait.
Vaupel sees this “mortality deceleration” as a subplot of a grand mystery that has preoccupied demographers for over a decade: Why have the elderly been living longer than their forebears since about 1970? Some of the causes are obvi- ous, such as the averting of millions of fatal heart attacks by blood-pressure drugs widely used since the 1960s. But many experts on aging feel that such well-known factors can’t explain the trend’s surprising speed and breadth. . . .
Casting about for explanations, some demog- raphers theorize that deep, little-understood changes are afoot that will help sustain the trend for decades. Vaupel has stuck his neck out far- ther than most by proposing that the aging process may actually slow down in very old peo- ple, an idea based on his mortality-deceleration work. That particular idea remains highly contro- versial. But Vaupel’s bullish view that longevity gains will continue apace is widely shared. Indeed, many demographers are now more bull- ish than the Social Security Administration, which projects that the decline in old-age death rates will slow to a crawl early in the next century.
The bulls’ predictions raise a burning issue: If we receive a gift of extra years, will it turn out to be a Pandora’s box filled with hobbling dis- eases? For most of this century death rates and the prevalence of chronic diseases among the el-