Peak child and the graying population of the developing world

[DainBramaged]

(Peak child, that's a new term for the doomsday predictors)

What are the biggest challenges of global health? Typically, we think in terms of things like vaccines and basic sanitation, which are issues in the poorest nations. But a panel on the topic, hosted by the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, painted a very different picture. The majority of the world's nations now look very much like the industrialized world, with small family sizes and life expectancies of around 70 years and up. Many of them, however, have gotten there without the sort of economic growth that preceded a graying population in the industrialized world. As a result, one of the big challenges in global health is now caring for an older population on a low budget.

The trends were driven home by the Karolinska Institute's Hans Rosling, who relied on graphs that can be created using a site called Gapminder.org. These track various demographic features of most of the world's nations, such as life expectancy, GDP per capita, etc. The plots can be rolled forward and backward in time, and individual countries can be traced as changes occur. Rosling used a series of these graphs to demonstrate a number of points about the trends that have taken place over the past century.

Rosling started with a plot of family size vs. life expectancy; in the 1960s, the industrial world occupied the upper-left corner of the graphs below, with small families and longer life expectancies. Track forward to today, and all but a few African countries (many of which are suffering from HIV epidemics) have made their way to the upper left of the graph. Now, as he pointed out, Bangladesh is where Germany was in the 1960s. For adults, the greatest risk of death is in traffic accidents; for children, it's drowning. "The world has gotten better," Rosling declared. "It's bullshit to say otherwise."

The net result is that we reached what he termed "peak child" in about 2005. The world used to be dominated by the population in the lowest age brackets. That's now starting to shift—with the biggest chunk of the population now being in adolescence. The world isn't getting gray just yet, but, as Rosling put it, "we now just have adult population growth."





http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/peak-child-and-the-graying-population-of-the-developing-world.ars


In a nutshell, more children, shorter lives.

[The2ndWheel]

1. Human beings have gotten better at staying alive longer

"The world has gotten better," Rosling declared. "It's bullshit to say otherwise."

That has nothing to do with the world. We've privatized the profits for people, and socialized the costs to more and more of the rest of life. Saying the world has gotten better because humans have increased life expectancy for ourselves is like saying our economy is better because Exxon(or pick your favorite corporation) has all the money.

[DainBramaged]

2. Uh, you don't think medicine getting better contributes to our world getting better?

Hmmmmmmm. just Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[The2ndWheel]

3. Our world? Sure

The world? No.

[DainBramaged]

4. Mmmmmmk, I get it..........

thanks.