Suchergebnisse

Gutman's study of the black family is one of those books which serve as a constant inspiration to academics. In those dreary moments when we wrestle with a particularly subtle point or phrase, a fleeting question occurs to most of us. How many people will really appreciate the depth of our thinking or the way in which the prose really captures the essence of the phenomenon being explained? But when such pernicious thoughts disturb our concentration, the example of Gutman's work can banish them, for this book has had more reviewers than some technical pieces have had serious readers. Indeed the November 1978 SSHA session indicates that it still continues. Not only has Gutman's book been seriously read and pondered, but there are a substantial number of pages in print to indicate that all the subtleties have been duly appreciated.

The dependency ratio and its components have had a long and productive life. Here we show that they are no longer the most accurate way of measuring important aspects of population aging. We present ratios related to employment, standardized workers and consumers, health care costs, pension costs, and who is old. These ratios are based either on new data or on new approaches to the study of population aging and are all available on the internet. We compare forecasts of those ratios with forecasts of the dependency ratio, both based on the same UN population data. In all cases, we find that the dependency ratio and the old‐age dependency ratio are poor approximations to the more up‐to‐date ratios. There is little need to use the dependency ratio. More accurate measures are readily available.