Longevity and Demographics

At the time of writing, 7,783,401,719 people inhabit the planet. The figure has increased at the end of this paragraph and will be much higher by the time it is read. The number, which is approaching eight trillion, represents the  world population count and is on the rise continuously. If we look at the age distribution (which is allowed by data from the United States Census Bureau and other agencies such as the United States Census Bureau), the projections of how that figure grows are not distributed equally by age. Longevity and demographics is a special thing to study.

The case of Spain is paradigmatic, and the data can be consulted in the report “A profile of the elderly in Spain -2019“.

At the end of this century, there will be more people in the world over the age of 65 than under the age of 15. Those over the age of 70, which were 200 million people in 1950, will be 2 billion before the year 2100. Thus the world’s population is aging and is doing so in all or almost all countries of the world.

Have to go back more than 20 years to find the oldest person in history. Her name was Jeanne Calment and this woman constitutes the known limit of longevity. He lived to be 122 years old. Although no one has broken its record, the evolution of the demographic distribution of the population allows  to predict a near future in which life expectancy reaches 100 years.  It is plausible that it will happen at the end of this century, especially if we take into account that the life expectancy of Japanese women is already almost 90 years (86.8 in 2017, according to the OMS).

Currently, 17% of the population is over 80 and 5% over 100,  These are figures unthinkable just a few decades ago and they are data that force us to redefine certain concepts that we took for granted. According to our expert, Massimo Livi-Bacci, until now the societies have relied on assigning different immovable roles to each age group. It was stipulated that education was concentrated in childhood and youth and this is a concept that is changing by leaps and bounds. In fact, there is already talk of lifelong learning or lifelong learning. “Knowledge is renewed and updated at such a speed that we can never stop learning,” says Livi-Bacci, who points to a reality recognized by all: the rigidity of the roles that society assigns to each age is being broken,

It is not the only change that comes with the increase in life expectancy. The logical thing would be to think that, if it reaches 100 years, the working life is extended and the current retirement, established in many countries before the age of 70, will be delayed at least until 75. However, this will not be an easy or automatic process.

If we ask ourselves the question of whether health in 2030 will be better than it is today – although we are only 10 years apart – the answer is an enigma. Although the signs seem to point to it being better, the World Alzheimer Report 2015 notes that between 2015 and 2050 cases of the disease will increase by 56% in the richest countries and 239% in the poorest. Some of the participants in the Future Trends Forum on Longevity believe that this disparity around this ailment will be similar in other aspects of health and that the world will be divided in two, that of the privileged society that has access to health care and that of the one that does not. This division makes it difficult to predict globally what health will be like in 2030 and also whether technology will benefit this aspect of society globally

If it seems clear that life expectancy cannot vary considerably between now and 2030 in a generalized way, but it will do so in some countries where it is lower today.