Foreign Scholar Lecture Series
Date and time: March 17 (Mon.), 2025, 10:30 - 12:00
Venue: IPSS Meeting Room No.4 & 5 (in-person and online hybrid), with Japanese and English simultaneous translation
Lecturer: Dr. Hiram Beltran-Sanchez (Professor, UCLA) Profile
Abstract:
Over the course of the 20th century, human life expectancy at birth rose in developed nations by around 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine. Mortality reduction observed initially at an early age, continued into middle and older ages. However, it was unclear whether this phenomenon and the resulting accelerated rise in life expectancy would continue into the 21st century. In this presentation I show data from national vital statistics in the nine longest-lived populations and the U.S. from 1990 to 2019 to explore recent trends in death rates and life expectancy. I show that since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated. This analysis also reveals that resistance to improvements in life expectancy increased, while lifespan inequality declined, and mortality compression occurred. This analysis suggests that survival to age 100 is unlikely to exceed 15 percent for females and 5 percent for males, altogether suggesting that unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.
