Nasty Brutish and Short? III

As I say above, following the initial mortality decline all societies are effectively ageing, the ageing is continuous, and at the present time it is hard to identify a natural barrier to this process. In this sense the transition doesn't really seem to have an 'end state', and thus can hardly be called a transition, since the word transition seems to imply something. If there is in fact a transition it is one from a society homeostatically balanced around high mortality to one which is pivoted around low and steadily declining mortality.

Having said this, and in fairness to Lee, what may be meant by ageing is a society with a comparatively high proportion of dependent elderly. On this view the initial mortality decline creates a dependency ratio which is considerably higher than that in the earlier agricultural society. This 'imbalance' takes many years to correct as fertility rates remain high and societies slowly recover the earlier ratios. But equilibrium is not recovered, and dependency ratios once more start to rise, this time amongst the elderly population. So this is what many may mean by ageing societies: societies where elderly dependency ratios rise (and continue to increase) above a certain notional level.

This way of looking at things has a certain validity, but it does beg one very important - indeed possibly critical from a policy perspective - question: just what do we mean by 'old'. The expression, like the terms modern and post-modern is a deceptive one, since it gives the impression of veing carved eternally in time, when in fact it is, of course, an extraordinarily relative one. To give one illustrative example, one populist Turkish politician got himself elected on a promise to introduce male pensions from the age of 43 and female ones from the age of 39 (something which, of course, resulted in the worst pension's crisis in history). He presumeably thought that 43 was 'old' and those who voted him into power evidently agreed. What we consider to be old is a socially defined (and hence relative) concept. It will hold different values at different times, and as life expectancy reaches ever higher limits we can expect our definition to adjust accordingly. This topic however, will have to await a later stage in the argument to receive the elaboration which it deserves. Simply consider this a foretaste.

Whatever the ultimate verdict on the validity of the phases schema, it should be noted that societies which enter the transition later tend to pass through it at an ever increasing rate. This if we take the mortality decline component we can see that gains in life expectancy have occured in the twentieth century in developing countries at rates which are rapidly by historical standards. In India, life expectancy rose from around 24 years in 1920 to 62 years today (a gain of 0.48 years per calendar year over 80 years), while in China, life expectancy rose from 41 in 1950–1955 to 70 in 1995–1999, (a gain of 0.65 years per year over 45 years.(Lee 2003) Fertility transitions since World War II have typically been more rapid than those for the developed countries, with fertility reaching replacement in 20 to 30 years after onset for those countries that have now completed the transition. Fertility transitions in east Asia have been particularly early and rapid, while those in south Asia and Latin America have been slower in starting but now seem to be accelerating (Casterline, 2001, United Nations Population Division, 2003).