Mere Mortals no Longer?

The evolution of mortality through the demographic transition is as close as we come to a deterministic process in the analysis of population dynamics. Science and technology have become increasingly better at keeping people alive, a benefit that still seems to drive the human experience to this day. It’s possible to identify milestones through history such as the development of modern sanitation to defeat contagious air- and waterborne illnesses, the development of vaccines for specific illnesses, as well as overall technological development in the field of healthcare. It is a story about pinning down the causality between rising national income and technological development and the improvement in the human living condition in the past 250 years. Researchers still debate the relative importance and merits of specific drivers, but it’s possible to generalize, all the same. The story about of human mortality is contained in a few relationships, for the individual, between, and possibly within countries. It is a story about Nike swoosh-shaped, logarithmic and asymptotic curves, and the extent to which we observe deviations from such stylized relationships over time, and why.

Do you want to read the rest? Click here for the PDF.

This is second chapter in my project attempting to update my own, and my readers’, knowledge of the demographic transition, population dynamics and the human living condition in general. You can click straight through to the PDF from the link above, or you can go to the landing page where you can read more about the project, see the first chapter and peruse the list of references.