19 April 2021
Webinar

Redefining Old Age

IIASA demographer Sergei Scherbov is invited to talk about new ways of measuring aging that more accurately represent the real world at the webinar organized by Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, Bocconi University.

© Aliaksandr Kalenik | Dreamstime.com

© Aliaksandr Kalenik | Dreamstime.com

Most studies of population aging focus on only one characteristic of people: their chronological age. For example, the Old Age Dependency Ratio categorizes people as “old” at age 65, regardless of whether they were living 50 years ago or are likely to be living 50 years in the future. But 65-year-olds today generally have higher remaining life expectancies and are healthier than their counterparts in previous generations. Age-specific characteristics vary over time and place. Focusing on only one aspect of the changes entailed in population aging but not on all the others provides a limited picture that is often not appropriate for scientific study or policy analysis.

Dr. Scherbov's presentation is devoted to new ways of measuring aging that more accurately represent the real world. He argues that once more adequate measures of aging are used past aging looks very different and in countries with high life expectancies almost no aging was observed. Future aging trends look much less gloomy when new indicators of aging are used compared to traditional approaches.

The recently developed characteristics approach for the study of population aging will be introduced and used in evaluating differences in aging across space and time. The main idea of the approach is the conversion of different characteristics that reflect people’s physical, cognitive or health conditions to a single metric. The hallmark of the approach is the consistent use of changing characteristic schedules together with changing age structures, regardless of the exact way in which the two are combined. 

Sergei Scherbov is an expert in the fields of demographic modelling, population projections and measuring aging. His main current research interests are in population projections, new measures of aging, and analysis of aging that takes into consideration changing characteristics of people. He is author, co-author and co-editor of several books and more than 200 articles published in professional journals including 7 articles in Science and Nature.


Date and time: 19 April 2021, 12.30 (EST)
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/93727343981
For more information visit organizer's website



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Last edited: 19 April 2021

CONTACT DETAILS

Sergei Scherbov

Distinguished Emeritus Research Scholar Social Cohesion, Health, and Wellbeing Research Group - Population and Just Societies Program

PUBLICATIONS

Reassessing Aging from a Population Perspective (Re-Aging) project

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313