Aging Societies and Life Expectancy

It is clear that most, if not all developed countries are suffering from poorly managed aging societies, Japan in particular, and therefore it is increasingly necessary to challenge the notion of 'aging'. What makes a person elderly? Although this notion differs per culture, it also differs throughout time.

It is interesting to see the perspective of English author Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, who wrote in ‘A Writer’s Diary’ at the age of 37 to her future self: “50 is elderly, though I anticipate her protest and agree that it is not old”. As people’s life expectancy has been raised in the last 130 years in many developed countries, so have the notions of what is considered ‘elderly’. As the figure below shows, the average life expectancy in the Netherlands in 1850 was only half of what it is today. The statistic bureaus of many Western countries use the age of retirement as a boundary condition for ‘elderly’. However, in recent years the retirement age of many of these countries is increasing or about to increase, along with aging populations. What may be the retirement age this year, may not be the retirement age next year, thus causing a shift in the amount of population that might be included in this group. Furthermore, what is elderly or even what the retirement age is differs per country and per culture and may be incomparable, especially between developing and developed countries. 

Life expectancy in the Netherlands in selected time periods, based on the publication Population Issues in the Netherlands (2000).