Yesterday's Guardian ran a piece occupying about 16 column inches, arranged in two columns, headed up 'study on aging eases fears of demographic time bomb'. A piece which I tried to read at some point during the day.
It seems that some bright spark at ONS, the Office for National Statistics, had come up with the catchy phrase 'remaining life expectancy', RLE for short. And then proceeded to come up with various analyses of same. So, for example, you might track the numbers of people for whom RLE=15 years, over time. You might analyse them by age, sex and marital condition. Sadly, I quite failed to make any sense of it. Perhaps it was too soon after lunch.
But I did associate to a similar phrase 'completed family size', CFS for short, which was a fashionable subject of analysis when I knew about such things, more than forty years ago. I think the idea was to get away from the caprices of age specific birth rates for women. At which time I remember the people (as represented by the Daily Mail and others) was more concerned with excess migration than with excess breeding, but it was a long time ago.
I then moved onto the ONS website at reference 1 and asked it about 'remaining life expectancy', which produced 532 results, of which 450 were data items and 57 were publications. Don't yet know what the rest were. And haven't yet found the trigger for the Guardian article. Work in progress. Slowly.
Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.
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