With Boomers on the cusp of "senior" status, senior growth rates from 2010 to 2030 are projected to exceed 30%, compared to an 8 - 9% per decade growth in the U.S. population as a whole. There is significant diversity within the senior category, and in how the demographics of aging impact different communities.
[...]Over the next two decades, from 2010 to 2030, the nation's 65-and-over population will grow much faster than in recent U.S. history. While the nation as a whole is projected to grow at roughly 8 to 9 percent each decade, senior growth rates will top 30 percent.[...] The aging of the baby boom generation is noteworthy not only because of its large size, but also because its members' social and demographic profile contrasts sharply with earlier generations at retirement age.[...] Boomers possess more education, have more women in the labor force, are more likely to occupy professional and managerial positions, and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their predecessors. At the same time, their higher rates of divorce and separation, lower rates of marriage, and fewer children signal the potential for greater divisions in seniorhood between those who will live comfortably, and those who will have fewer resources available to them.[...] The phenomenon of "aging in place," rather than senior migration, explains much of the difference between areas with fast- and slow-growing senior populations.[...] States and metropolitan areas experiencing fast senior growth, such as Arizona and Austin, typically accumulated large numbers of working-age in-migrants who remained in these areas as they got older. These places tend to have senior populations with higher incomes, more education, and more people in their "young senior" (age 65 to 74) years. In contrast, metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest with slow senior growth lost working-age migrants in past decades, and thus have smaller aging-in-place populations today; many are also losing younger seniors. (pp. 78-79).
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Life expectancy of women in the Deep South and Appalachia declined unexpectedly.
While most Americans enjoyed a clear jump in life expectancy from 1960 to 2000, a startling number - especially women - living primarily in the Deep South and in Appalachia actually saw a drop in life spans beginning in 1983, says a study that came out Monday [April 21, 2008]. In sum, where you live makes a difference in how long you can expect to live. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington found that 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either declines or stagnation in their life expectancy in the '80s and '90s. The paper appears in the online nonprofit journal The Public Library of Science. Most counties with the worst downward swings were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.
APRIL 21, 2008, Life Spans Decline in Some U.S. Areas, by Janet Kornblum, USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com.
Original article: APRIL 22, 2008, The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in County Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States, by Majid Ezzati, Ari B. Friedman, Sandeep C. Kulkarni, Christopher J. L. Murray, PLoS Med, 5:4,http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050066.[posted 4/24/2008]
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