People “forgetting” to report deaths to the pension authority is hardly a uniquely Japanese move. It happens all the time in the US too. What seems different about Japan is how little the government tried to use other sources to corroborate whether or not pensioners were still alive.
A sedentary lifestyle and urbanization began taking over our culture after the great depression in the 1930’s.
Farm boys used to do real physical labor on farms from a young age. They were very fit their entire lives unless they got injured.
Populations and jobs shifted to the cities. Children no longer did physical labor. Adults worked in stores, offices, or manufacturing. Only a small percentage still performed jobs that required extensive physical labor.
Our culture will really pay the price beginning with the baby boomers. I don’t see that generation creating many centenarians.
The Italian at the top of the list just died, so all the statistics given are now wrong.
Probably as wrong as all the theorizing about American diet. Nah, nothing can be that wrong.
aceplace57 writes:
> A sedentary lifestyle and urbanization began taking over our culture after the great
> depression in the 1930’s.
>
> Farm boys used to do real physical labor on farms from a young age. They were very fit
> their entire lives unless they got injured.
>
> Populations and jobs shifted to the cities. Children no longer did physical labor. Adults
> worked in stores, offices, or manufacturing. Only a small percentage still performed jobs
> that required extensive physical labor.
All this is true of every other country in the developed world, so it has nothing to do with any difference between the U.S. and the rest of the developed world.
Urban living in and of itself isn’t really a determining factor, but how people get around is. panache45 also mentioned diet, and I’ll grant that Italians and Japanese tend to eat better than Americans, though the Japanese diet is much higher in salt and fat content than you might think. Italians and Japanese, and indeed much of the world population, walk around a lot more than Americans or Canadians who mostly have no choice but to drive everywhere. That’s especially problematic as one ages. Tottering around to the hairdresser, library, or grocery store will improve health compared to being shuttled to the mall once a week. Burning off an extra 200 calories or so a day (about one hour of leisurely walking) can make all the difference between gaining weight over time versus maintaining a healthy weight. So many analyses of why different cultures are more or less healthy focus only on diet and occupation, without factoring in how people get around to their daily needs.
The lack of walking is a concern in America.
I walked less than earlier generations. But it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk a mile or so to a friend’s house or the theater at the shopping center. I never gave it a second thought.
That doesn’t happen as often anymore. Kids are driven most places. Even visiting a friend’s house a block or two away requires a trip in a car.
Or they just Skype or IM and avoid even leaving the room. 
I think that is a direct result of the “stranger danger” fears that really took off in the 1980s.
Let’s try to look at the issue logically.
First, absolutely nothing about modern day diet and habits have any meaning when applied to people who have lived for 100 years. Their formative years were half a century and more ago.
Second, the number of births in the US in 1910 was 2,777,000. The number of centenarians in the US census in 2010 was 53,364, or about 2%. The number of supercentenarians was, as of yesterday, 31, or about 0.0001%. This is an extremely rare event. Again, trying to apply superficial stereotypes and generalities about the population as a whole stops thought; it does not explain anything. Even if you looked out 100 years into the future, the overall stereotyped habits of the general population would explain nothing about the outliers, the 1 in 100,000. It’s as silly as explaining the number of seven footers in the NBA by how much they walk.
Genetic factors almost certainly explain who lives 110 years and who doesn’t. The listing on Wikipediareveals that of the 31 supers, 28 are female and 3 are men. Are we really supposed to believe that’s the result of women walking more or eating less junk food?
The only other factor that has much explanatory power for the 1 in 100,000 is pure luck. They didn’t get run over or shot or killed in a war or die in a plane crash or succumb to an epidemic or get swept up in a tornado or any of the million other accidental ways people get killed. You have to assume that many of those who did die in these ways, almost certainly at least 31 of them, would have lived to be 110 were it not for bad luck.
Do scientists know exactly why these people outlived their contemporaries? No. But they are very sure that stereotypes about today’s youth plays no part in the explanation.
We won’t know for a few more decades. We’re just now seeing the post WWI generation enter advanced age.
The Boomers are still 25 or so years away from becoming centenarians.
Let’s reopen this zombie in 2046 and discusses the subject more.
Baby Boomers are people born between 1946 and 1964. So Baby Boomers are somewhere between 29 and 47 years from being centenarians. Furthermore, what we’re talking about are supercentenarians (over 110), not centenarians (over 100), so it’s really more like somewhere between 39 and 57 years from their reaching this age.
Lots of problems with the question.
First and foremost we must acknowledge recognizing the difficulty of the datasets. Birth record reliability was very different in different parts of the world over a century ago and some of the list may reflect when each country started to implement systems of birth record keeping of reliability for more of their population. The issue of failing to record deaths has already been addressed.
Does the fact that of the 100 verified oldest living people 26% are American and 27% are Japanese reflect that those countries produce so many more older people than say, China or India, or that those countries had better birth record keeping 110 to 120 years.
Is the fact that of the verifiable oldest ever 45% were American and 23% were Japanese only a reflection of actual extreme longevity rates?
And of course population n matters, and how much of the population is older versus how much is weighted to the relatively young, due to birth rates and immigration. Japan and Italy both skew old.
FWIW my take would be that the historic dominance of Americans at the top of that list is mostly an artifact reflective of better record keeping from the post-Civil War period on in America than in many other large population centers.
I don’t have the data but an interesting question would be given getting to 80, 90, and 100, what rate in each country reach the following next decade and various times beyond? And how has that changed over time?
FWIW the US still has the greatest absolute number of centenarians.
Infant mortality statistics can be very misleading. In the US, a baby born at 23 weeks is considered a live birth, so if they die it goes into the infant mortality stats. In other countries a birth at 23 weeks would be considered a miscarriage.
This, and also the fact that people’s ages are now much easier to document than they were in the past.
Remember all the 150-year-old men from central Russia in past decades? Many of them assumed the identities of older relatives in order to avoid military service, and kept doing so after the conflicts ended. :rolleyes:
He said US, not Canada. Although I’m convinced that I can make myself believe poutine extends life if I try hard enough.
Not sure if you’d call it smart-a$$ed or not, but his response may not be that far off. Someone who has a “long” life but with bad habits, is more likely to have been overweight than to have been a smoker, yet those who have lived “unusually” long lives are more likely to have been smokers, or smoked late in life than to have been overweight. Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever, lived to be 122 and smoked for something like 100 years.
The absolutely gobsmacking thing about both those lists is that neither of them list one single Chinese person. Out of a nation of a billion people, I don’t really credit that there are zero people born before 1907, though fair enough there might be no-one who can prove or have put in the effort to prove it to (English speaking, Western-based…) World Record authorities
Looking at the list of oldest Americans ever, clicking on the DoB column, leads me to some quickie conclusions:
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The max age is fairly stable: 113-144 with a few outliers at 115-117. No obvious trend that suggests anything statisically odd given the small sample size, etc.
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OTOH, the max. is stable. Per experts on the matter, this is getting to the limit of what even the best people can reach.
So, the US reached this limit fairly early on compared to other countries. Better diet, etc. Plus the record keeping thing.
Now, others are catching up.
ftg writes:
> The max age is fairly stable: 113-144 with a few outliers at 115-117.
I presume you mean 113-114. I once decided on the basis of some or other calculation that I don’t remember that once you live to 110, you have a half-life of eight to nine months. In other words, half the people who live to 110 will die before 110 plus eight to nine months. Half the survivors will die before 111 plus four to six months. Half the survivors at that point will die before 112 plus zero to three months, etc. This means that if 4096 (2 to the 12th) people (in modern reliable records) have ever lived to be 110, we can expect that just one has lived to be 118. That would be fairly close to what’s happened. No one has died at 118. One person has died at 119 and one has died at 122.
Here’s the tally by country of the list of the world’s 100 oldest living people (link provided in the OP).
Argentina 1
Australia 3
Brazil 1
Canada 2
Cape Verde 1
Denmark 1
France 11
Germany 5
Israel 1
Italy 7
Jamaica 1
Japan 27
Netherlands 1
Panama 1
Poland 2
Spain 5
United Kingdom 4
United States 26
The US is 26% of the list compared to less than 5% of the world population. Depending on what metric you use the US may not be number one, but it’s sort of silly to suggest that the US can’t compete when it comes to making old people.
I’m surprised Australia made the list at all, what with all the man-eating spiders.