Age Trajectories Over the Secular Shift in the West and in Some Countries of East[*]
We have made use of the demographic statistics of Japan in the course of the argument, as a supplement and a contrast to those of the Western developed countries. We have also repeatedly asserted that the historical de-mography of aging in every country, and this means, of course, a collection consisting as to a vast majority of less-developed countries, will sooner or later follow the same course. The higher will succeed to the lower plateau in all of them, and the secular shift in aging will do much to transform their social landscapes.
Here we will make use of the Japanese data as well as data from one or two other East Asian countries to give substance to these propositions and to justify the statement made at the outset that the Western aging experience has a transcendent importance because it has happened first. With these additional facts in front of us, we shall proceed to a conclusion.
Because our sources for this section are published demographic statements, it will not be possible in this very brief exposition of such facts as have become known to us to keep to the experiential aging measures that have here been declared necessary for the comparative pursuit of the historical demography of aging. We shall have to content ourselves with the cruder measures we began with and which have been subjected to criticism. We shall proceed, moreover, in a summary fashion, by way of commentary on the six figures that follow.
In figure 1.12, two features have to be noticed. The first is that the trajectories of the growth in proportions of elderly (here those over 65 rather than those over 60) are measured on a scale of years from starting points placed thirty years apart, that of Japan from 1950 and that of China from 1980. This circumstance makes the second feature even more remarkable, that the two trajectories should follow each other so closely. This is in spite of the gap between their starting points, which implies that the shifts were initiated in very different world situations and very different local, North-
east Asian, North Pacific situations. The enormous dissimilarities between the two countries—in size, in culture, in social structure, in history (especially recent history), in wealth, in degree of development—seem not to have mattered.
This parallel effect is certainly surprising and suggests a definiteness and autonomy in the secular shift that could scarcely have been inferred from the evidence of the other countries we have surveyed. It is true that the comparison is largely based on projected trends of population aging (from the fourth decade in the case of Japan and the second in the case of China). It is also true that such projected results are essentially determined by the demographic parameters that have been used, and they could vary considerably according to the assumptions being made. But many other projected results indicate that in China, the aging trajectory is likely to be very similar to that which has been and will continue to be observed in Japan unless unexpected changes in fertility or mortality occur to alter them. Short of an entirely improbable set of circumstances, or of borrowings from one set of projections to form the other, the trajectories and their close rapprochement must represent a genuine phenomenon.
In figure 1.13, four trajectories have been added to those represented in figure 1.12. The South Korean case is based mainly on forecasts, while the European cases rely to a far smaller extent on such projections. It is difficult to decide precisely the time when each population embarks on the secular shift, but for the purpose of comparing its speed in various countries, a starting point is arbitrarily chosen from the trajectory of the growth in propor-
tions elderly. Here the point selected is that at which the proportion age 65 and over is close to 5 percent of the total population and thereafter rises rapidly and monotonically. Figure 1.13 shows that a rise in the proportions of those over 65 from a level of 5 percent to a level of 15 percent occupied about 150 years in France, about 115 years in Sweden, and about 90 years in England and Wales but about 60 years in China and Japan. In South Korea, if the projected trend continues after the year 2020, the increase in the proportion of the elderly may be even more rapid.
This conspicuous foreshortening of the time taken for drastic aging to occur has been noted before. In 1988, Naohiro Ogawa published figures showing that the years required for the proportion of the population over 65 to rise from 10 to 20 percent were 24 in Japan, 48 in Finland, the fastest European case, and ranged from 54 to 85 (Sweden) in the eight other European countries he selected (Ogawa 1988: table 8). All this implies that the secular shift has been very much briefer in Japan—about half of that in most northwestern European countries—and will no doubt be somewhat the same in China. The speeding up of the secular shift and the indication that it may intensify as country succeeds to country undergoing the shift in East Asia must be classed as singular phenomena.
We have dwelt a great deal upon the suddenness of the aging process in the West, on the extent to which it has been overlooked, and on consequent "false consciousness" about it. It seems that East Asia and perhaps other countries embarking or about to embark on the secular shift will undergo it with even greater rapidity. The Western precedent seems to be less help-
ful here. No one can yet tell what may happen in the way of social discontinuity and disorientation with regard to aging and age relationships after a shift of such rapidity.
A very similar reflection is suggested when figure 1.14 is added to the series, delineating comparisons in longevity. Here the time scale is a real one and the statistics observational. Once more the Southeast Asian populations have increased and are increasing their longevity far more quickly than ever the Europeans did, and they will outstrip them in short order if Japan is to be taken as precedent.
Figure 1.14 suggests something further (it suggests only, because the temporal depth is so shallow for the Asian populations). It may be—and the little historical work that has been done and that is known to us does nothing to contradict this—that expectation of life on the lower plateau in Asia, or in parts of Asia, was below what it was in Europe. There is a hint of this in the trajectory for Japan in figure 1.7. Early and near universal marriage for women, which we suppose to have been a widespread characteristic of
these countries, would certainly have made it possible for their populations to survive in the long term with lower expectation of life than has been found in the West in the past. We must be a little wary in comparison here, of course, because expectation of life at birth, which is all we have, may interfere a little with an objective contrast. But our knowledge of the plateau-like character of longevity over long periods certainly seems to imply that the rises in Japan, China, and South Korea are very unlikely to be a short-term variation in an otherwise generally even trajectory.
If this conjecture is correct, the lower longevity plateau in these countries may have been somewhat beneath that for Western populations but probably within its range of variation. We have as yet nothing to indicate the extent to which it was horizontal and flat. A further inference, therefore, that can be made from the figures is that the secular shift may start from a more modest level than that which obtained on the lower plateau in the West and so may have a longer slope upward. It could therefore take less time, travel farther, and be markedly steeper in these East Asian countries than it has been in Europe, America, and Australia. This would apply to both of our aging parameters, expectation of life and proportion in later life, and it has to be said that the first East Asian country to proceed through the shift, Japan, has displayed all these characteristics. The still more remote possibility that Western countries were perpetually somewhat longer lived than others on the lower plateau has no support known to us other than the indications of these figures. It is an intriguing possibility nevertheless.
Figures 1.15, 1.16, and 1.17 modulate the inferences we have made but certainly do not overset them. They are all in real time, over the period spec-
ified. The trajectory shown in figure 1.15 for expectation of life in Asia as a whole during this interlude (taken from Keyfitz and Flieger 1990) does not suggest that the entire continent will have a longer-lived population than the West. The pattern of the lines in that figure points to East Asian exceptions, however, and hints once again that longevity, could have been less before the secular shift began than in England (see, e.g., the figures in table 1.3, above). It is important to note that all the individual countries and areas shown in the figure have by now stepped over the threshold of the 3AI.
Figure 1.16 shows Japan overtaking European countries in proportions of elderly persons and rapidly acquiring the oldest age composition yet contemplated. The conceivable long-term difference between the Asian countries and the West with respect to both parameters on the lower plateau— Asia being the younger—is difficult to appreciate in view of the difference in the measures in figures 1.16 and 1.17 for proportions elderly from those used earlier, where proportions over 60 were used rather than proportions over 65.
But if it is remembered that proportions over 60 are likely to be about a third as high again as proportions over 65, a small margin in favor of the hypothesis is apparent. Finally, figure 1.17 makes it clear that in spite of the probability that all the Southeast Asian populations represented will show a similar pattern of change during the secular shift, the present temporal relationship between their trajectories is somewhat complex. The closeness of the observed and projected trajectories for Thailand and Malaysia, South Korea and China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore brings us back to what was said about figure 1.12 as to the near-identity in the course of aging in Japan and China.
This exercise illustrates many of the issues about the Before and the After in aging, the two aging plateaus, and the secular shift in rather unexpected ways. It puts the historical aging processes that the Western developed countries have experienced into a comparative context. And it adds emphasis to the contention that the historical demography of aging has to be seen in the widest possible context over time—past, present, and future—and over all the world's political and cultural areas.