LENGTH OF HUMAN LIFE
“ If cancer and heart affections can he kept down and other maladies elimated or very greatly reduced, we may get a death rate of perhaps five or six per thousand. The birth rate may be equally low. Should this happen a curious state of things may arise (writes Dr W. Barr, medical officer of health for Rotherham, in his annual report). He foreshadows a day when there will be more people over fifty years than under that age. The numerical ‘balance will shift from youth to age. Fewer and fewer •babies will be born, and more and more people will live to be sixty, seventy, eighty, and upward: The time will come when there will be more persons of both sexes over than under ififty years. It will then be an elderly nation. Youth and middle age will be outnumbered in business, in the professions, and at the ballot boxes. “ The seniors will preponderate, and will set the pace, rather a slow one; and of these seniors the majority will be ladies from fifty years upward, as the female expectation of life is far higher than the male. Eventually other nations will go the same. But we shall reach the goal first because of our lower death rate and higher ratio of female longvity. We shall be swayed by aged women and elderly men sooner than our rivals and competitors. Shall we gain or lose by the evolution?
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAIPO19251117.2.8
Bibliographic details
Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1687, 17 November 1925, Page 2
Word Count
242LENGTH OF HUMAN LIFE Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1687, 17 November 1925, Page 2
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