Taking the time travel machine today with a look back ten years ago to May 2014. What was I writing about then and does it still resonate? Perhaps not surprisingly it does to me. So this is an encore blog post with a few modifications to bring it up to date.
For all persons on the street with an address in “Any Town, Earth”, we are (as someone echoed my thoughts recently) – all of us, ageing. Only, we’re at different pin-points on the continuum from 2 to 102. In the western world, we are overly aware of this as it relates for example to our concentration on, or consternation about the so called Boomer generation.
On April 29th 2014 the Harvard Center for Population & Development Studiesheld a symposium to celebrate their 50th anniversary. It was in the reading of a recap on the talking points around their theme “Reimagining Societies in the Face of Demographic Change”, that all my decade or more study on this topic came full circle.
The conversations on global ageing patterns have overlapping aspects. My wonder is, how can we enlighten more people in “Any Town, Earth”? At an individual level we all relate to the timely touch points in the ageing process – wherever we are at any given moment. So what does it matter; how could global ageing on a mass scale mean something bigger to us on a Tuesday when it’s raining, and our older us slips on the steps to the doctor’s office?
Lot’s as it happens. Picking one; health care systems. It’s the one aspect in which Any Town will identify with daily. As Alvin Powell, in Managing an Aging Populace paraphrases Julio Frenk, Harvard Dean of Public Health – “current systems are mismatched … as health issues are not confined to national boundaries.”
Two other overlapping aspects of global ageing referred to in Alvin Powell’s article are “declining fertility and rapid aging”. What’s interesting about this is how these two topics crisscross continents. Where, for example, do both meet in the same place at the same rate?
Scroll through the different cuts on the chart such as – births and deaths, life expectancy and family planning. Hover over your area on the colour coded maps and up will display data on each of these categories.
Simply using this as a starting point really pushes you to want to understand how complex it is for individual countries to re-frame priorities for social policies within the context of examining global priorities. It’s easy to be fixated, looking only at the how life looks in your ten minute world and not looking at how you are meshing in the global patterns of an aging population.
Connecting all the dots; it’s like pointillist art. So goes Lisa Berkman, Director Harvard Center for Population & Development Studies who says we are at demographic crossroads. In Powell’s article, she further connects the dots in these overlapping aspects (declining fertility and rapid ageing, etc.) by reminding us that “the plight and welfare of women is a key factor”. And in that alone there are more than enough concerns not confined to national boundaries.
