Demographic Aging as a Challenge to Modern Societies

Abstract

This books aims to explore the challenges and the consequences of demographic aging. Population aging is not a new phenomenon. All highly developed countries, and particularly those in Europe, experienced a process of demographic aging throughout the entire twentieth century, a process that is ongoing. While in 1900 only 5 percent of the British population was 65 and over, this increased to 10.8 percent by 1950 and 15.8 percent by 2000; the share of the older population is expected to rise as high as 24.7 percent by 2050 (Phillipson, 2013, p. 12; United Nations, 2012). In Japan, where the demographic aging process over recent decades has been faster than anywhere else, people aged 65 and over now make up a quarter of the population; estimates made by the United Nations Population Division for 2050 add up to 36.5 percent. Even in the United States, whose population by Western standards is relatively young, the proportion of old people is expected to climb from 12.4 percent in 2000 to 21.4 percent in 2050 (United Nations, 2012). Other measures of population aging confirm the picture. The European median age, which divides the population into a younger and an older part of equal size, has risen from 28.9 in 1950 to 40.3 in 2010 (United Nations, 2012). At the same time, an increasing proportion of the elderly now survive into their eighties and nineties, and even become centenarians.