IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/dem/demres/v14y2006i2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Increments to life and mortality tempo

Author

Listed:
  • Griffith Feeney

    (Independent researcher)

Abstract

This paper introduces and develops the idea of “increments to life.” Increments to life are roughly analogous to forces of mortality: they are quantities specified for each age and time by a mathematical function of two variables that may be used to describe, analyze and model changing length of life in populations. The rationale is three-fold. First, I wanted a general mathematical representation of Bongaart’s “life extension” pill (Bongaarts and Feeney 2003) allowing for continuous variation in age and time. This is accomplished in sections 3-5, to which sections 1-2 are preliminaries. It turned out to be a good deal more difficult than I expected, partly on account of the mathematics, but mostly because it requires thinking in very unaccustomed ways. Second, I wanted a means of assessing the robustness of the Bongaarts-Feeney mortality tempo adjustment formula (Bongaarts and Feeney 2003) against variations in increments to life by age. Section 6 shows how the increments to life mathematics accomplishes this with an application to the Swedish data used in Bongaarts and Feeney (2003). In this application, at least, the Bongaarts-Feeney adjustment is robust. Third, I hoped by formulating age-variable increments to life to avoid the slight awkwardness of working with conditional rather than unconditional survival functions. This third aim has not been accomplished, but this appears to be because it was unreasonable to begin with. While it is possible to conceptualize length of life as completely described by an age-varying increments to life function, this is not consistent with the Bongaarts-Feeney mortality tempo adjustment. What seems to be needed, rather, is a model that incorporates two fundamentally different kinds of changes in mortality and length of life, one based on the familiar force of mortality function, the other based on the increments to life function. Section 7 considers heuristically what such models might look like.

Suggested Citation

  • Griffith Feeney, 2006. "Increments to life and mortality tempo," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 14(2), pages 27-46.
    • Handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:14:y:2006:i:2
    DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2006.14.2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol14/2/14-2.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.4054/DemRes.2006.14.2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John Bongaarts & Griffith Feeney, 2002. "How Long Do We Live?," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 28(1), pages 13-29, March.
    2. James Vaupel & Anatoli Yashin, 1987. "Repeated resuscitation: How lifesaving alters life tables," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 24(1), pages 123-135, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vladimir Canudas-Romo, 2008. "The modal age at death and the shifting mortality hypothesis," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 19(30), pages 1179-1204.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maxim S. Finkelstein, 2004. "Mortality in varying environment," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2004-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    2. Maxim S. Finkelstein, 2003. "Age correspondence for different mortality regimes with and without the change point," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2003-039, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    3. Finkelstein, Maxim, 2013. "Lifesaving, delayed deaths and cure in mortality modeling," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 15-19.
    4. James W. Vaupel, 2002. "Life Expectancy at Current Rates vs. Current Conditions," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 7(8), pages 365-378.
    5. Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher & Vladimir Canudas-Romo & James E. Oeppen & James W. Vaupel, 2017. "Coherent forecasts of mortality with compositional data analysis," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 37(17), pages 527-566.
    6. Robert Schoen & Vladimir Canudas-Romo, 2005. "Changing mortality and average cohort life expectancy," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 13(5), pages 117-142.
    7. Quanbao Jiang & Marcus Feldman & Shuzhuo Li, 2014. "Marriage Squeeze, Never-Married Proportion, and Mean Age at First Marriage in China," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 33(2), pages 189-204, April.
    8. Aymric Kamega & Frédéric Planchet, 2011. "Hétérogénéité : mesure du risque d'estimation dans le cas d'une modélisation intégrant des facteurs observables," Post-Print hal-00593874, HAL.
    9. James W. Vaupel, 2009. "Lively Questions for Demographers about Death at Older Ages," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 35(2), pages 347-356, June.
    10. Carl Schmertmann, 2020. "Revivorship and life lost to mortality," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 42(17), pages 497-512.
    11. Marc Luy, 2006. "Mortality tempo-adjustment," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 15(21), pages 561-590.
    12. Warren C. Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov, 2007. "A new perspective on population aging," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 16(2), pages 27-58.
    13. Chiara Gigliarano & Ugofilippo Basellini & Marco Bonetti, 2017. "Longevity and concentration in survival times: the log-scale-location family of failure time models," Lifetime Data Analysis: An International Journal Devoted to Statistical Methods and Applications for Time-to-Event Data, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 254-274, April.
    14. Seaman, Rosie & Riffe, Tim & Leyland, Alastair H. & Popham, Frank & van Raalte, Alyson, 2019. "The increasing lifespan variation gradient by area-level deprivation: A decomposition analysis of Scotland 1981–2011," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 230(C), pages 147-157.
    15. Alberto Palloni & Laeticia Souza, 2013. "The fragility of the future and the tug of the past," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 29(21), pages 543-578.
    16. Shiro Horiuchi, 2005. "Tempo effect on age-specific death rates," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 13(8), pages 189-200.
    17. Shripad Tuljapurkar & Ryan Edwards, 2011. "Variance in death and its implications for modeling and forecasting mortality," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 24(21), pages 497-526.
    18. Robert Schoen, 2013. "A dynamic birth-death model via Intrinsic Linkage," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 28(35), pages 995-1020.
    19. Joshua R. Goldstein, 2006. "Found in translation?," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 14(5), pages 71-84.
    20. Ørnulf Borgan & Nico Keilman, 2019. "Do Japanese and Italian Women Live Longer than Women in Scandinavia?," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 35(1), pages 87-99, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:14:y:2006:i:2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Editorial Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.