Misconceptions and misapprehensions about population ageing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The last decade has seen the emergence of neo-liberal policies and agendas, and a parallel dismantling of the public provision of health and social services and programmes in most western countries. This neo-liberalism represents an endorsement of, or at the very least an accommodation to, the primacy of the individual and his/her efforts to ensure his/her own well-being, and a corresponding de-emphasis of conceptualizations of, and commitments to, shared risk, rights of citizenship, and the common good. Population ageing has played a fundamental role in this transition; the public costs of population ageing—particularly regarding health care and pensions—are purported to be unsustainable without considerable welfare state ‘reform’. Reform is of course a process, and it has taken differing shapes in various western countries. I focus on North America, and particularly Canada, examining the links between reform and (mis)perceptions about population ageing, concentrating on the latter. In the last few years, three monographs highlighting the fallacies of current, taken-for-granted understandings of population ageing have appeared: Demography is not Destiny, 1 published in the US; the Canadian-based The Overselling of Population Aging: Apocalyptic Demography, Intergenerational Challenges, and Social Policy, 2 and The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population is not a Social Problem 3 from the UK. These monographs were preceded by a few journal articles with the same theme. 4‐8 While the still dim voices of these demographers and gerontologists are beginning to be heard, more people have to pay attention. This paper seeks to deconstruct the misperception that population ageing is necessarily the social crisis/social problem that it is commonly believed to be; this will be done by illuminating untested and sometimes clearly wrong assumptions. This misperception contains (at least) four interrelated components that will be dealt with separately for the purposes of analysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it