Redefining Old Age

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.