ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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Happy that the world was so wonderful, or depressed that their insight was so poor?
Would that not depend upon whether U.N. statisticians view older, healthier, or more people as assets or as liabilities?
Or, given the answer to that question, would we know the answers to quite a number of other questions?
"Happy that the world was so wonderful, or depressed that their insight was so poor?"
I believe the UN population folks are looking at the best evidence available at the time. Which is THE ONLY DEFENSIBLE WAY to make a prediction.
They are not in the business of pulling numbers out of the air as do many cornucopians. The numbers produced by the latter are almost useless.
Seems like the UN is doing exactly what they should be doing.
In other words, nothing to see here folks. Keep moving.
"In other words, nothing to see here folks. Keep moving."
Nonsense. The UN people should have been assuming that the maximum age would continue its upward trend. There was more evidence to support that the trend would continue upward than there was evidence to support that the trend would stop.
They're better off using current values. I see no reason the difference between men dying at 72.6 years and 75 years, for example, has any appreciable bearing upon overall population numbers. Even if revised up from there. I think the UN is better off using real data based upon developed nations--e.g. birth rates--than to pull numbers out of a hat.
It's obvious to me that the UN statisticians needed to speak with some good geriatricians. The problem with the statistics was with the underlying assumptions. The UN statisticians assumed there would be no significant medical advances related to longevity. That is equivalent to assuming no significant future advances in agricultural productivity. The UN statisticians were not "doing exactly what they should be doing." They were lazy and used old trend data to project future changes in longevity without considering the effects of modern medicine.
SydB scoffs at a 2.4 year increase in longevity. But, a 3% increase in lifespan has a signficant affect on total population. The number of person-years goes from 494 to 510 billion. That's the equivalent of 213 million births. Since annual births are 154 million, the effect of increased longevity is equivalent to 1.4 years of births.
The other thing to keep in mind about a small change in the expected value -- this will have huge consequences in the right tail, such as people living past 90 or 100 nowadays vs. 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago.