Is life expectancy still increasing in the UK? A short thread on why experts have come to different conclusions in recent years but why I think the latest data clearly shows an underlying trend of increasing #longevity. 1/6

🎓🎩Congratulations, Donata Stonkute! She successfully defended her doctoral thesis “Measuring and Explaining the Educational Gradient in Health Across Europe: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors” at the University of Helsinki. IMPRS-PHDS https://www.demogr.mpg.de/go/phdds

1992 two optimistic takes on the future were published: Fukuyama reflected on global convergence towards liberal democracy while Lee & Carter revolutionized mortality forecasts with a model of ever lasting log-linear progress in mortality improvements. From my recent talk on Lee-Carter with crises.

The Geography of the Labour Force Composition in the Netherlands by Ate Poorthuis (doi.org/10.1111/tesg...). One of the best uses of the centered ternary balance scheme (www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...) I've seen so far. Build with tricolore github.com/jschoeley/tr... @ikashnitsky.phd

Today, launching the World Urbanization Prospects 2025 with new UN estimates and projections of urbanization for 237 countries and areas of the world & 12,000+ cities with 50,000+ inhabitants in 2025. www.un.org/development/... - see also new online datasets and plots: population.un.org/wup/

Our new paper develops and tests a network-based method for estimating death rates in complex humanitarian emergencies. Joint w/ @dennisfeehan.bsky.social and team from Geneva-based NGO @impact-initiatives.bsky.social academic.oup.com/aje/advance-...

Historian Quinn Slobodian in the Financial Times today describing how eugenics is now firmly back on the political agenda www.ft.com/content/23e9...

Hah. My phone's gps location switched from south of Gotland to Kaliningrad while on a flight from Helsinki to Berlin. It was a clear night, so I guess stellar navigation was an option.

Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

I know the Laplace-transform from frailty models: modeling survival of populations with hidden heterogeneity in death rates. Early in my PhD I wanted to understand the meaning of the transform. Was advised against it by a physicist. Might give it another shot.

Check out this conference if you work on topics related to kinship structure and dynamics (within and beyond the household), caregiving, intergenerational processes, family bereavement, LGBTQ+ & chosen kinship, etc. @iussp.bsky.social Submit by 21 Jan 2026 👇 www.demogr.mpg.de/go/kinship-conference

Wow! Writing such a book on the side (!) is the mark of a scholar! Will there be an english translation?

Congratulations!

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are LLM written" will be a worse blow for the public perception of scientists than the original 2005 essay by Ioannidis. Doubly true for sociology. As a signal, I'd favor a ban on synthetic text, even if not enforceable. I use LLMs, but never for writing.

A welcome update from arXiv.org to combat garbage Gen AI/LLM papers that pollute the CS knowledge base: blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a... h/t @jschoeley.com

It's easy for some of you to just never use LLMs and just criticize people who do. I would like to be in that situation. But here I am, with my moderator volunteers, assessing hundreds of papers submitted to @socarxiv.bsky.social, trying to decide how to fairly judge whether to accept them. /1

It's Friday night, Halloween! Who's with me for a thread about the economics of pronatalism?! Some people say we need more babies because we don't have enough workers. But more births means less women workers, by ~15-40%. You trade workers today for workers tomorrow. This is from CPS data: /1

Traveling to a conference, a US customs officer requested me to "tell me something I don't know". -"Mortality wise the US looks more similar to 90's Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Stalling life expectancy and rising lifespan inequality." (Is what I should have answered)

3 full-time positions on Probabilistic Migration Modeling at University of @helsinki.fi in collaboration with @mpidr.bsky.social and Mikko Myrskylä. DM me if you want to know more, as I'm part of the project. Definitely DM me if you heard of conformal prediction www.vaestoliitto.fi/en/news/post...

Jim Oeppen showing latitudinal gradient in life expectancy at @hmdatabase.bsky.social symposium in Paris.

Hot take: "Flattening the curve" successfully lowered overall life expectancy deficits since 2020, but also prolonged the period of excess deaths compared to countries with massive mortality shocks in 2020/2021. That's a public health communication challenge.

Session I on ✨pandemic & post-pandemic #mortality✨ features presentations by @jschoeley.com, Timothy Adair, Michel Guillot & Nazrul Islam, chaired by Vladimir Shkolnikov. #HMDsymposium2025 #LifeExpectancy #Inequality #Longevity

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

All models are true, some predict your data. This is where I stand after reifying "mortality laws", reifying mechanistic models, trying to have data without models, and reading Thomas Burch. I was honored to reflect on this journey in my keynote to the Evolutionary Demography Society.

More evidence about how disparate but influential groups - “self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists & conservative theologians” - are converging on far-right views & promoting a return to an “era that was colonial, Christian, patriarchal”

Just saw this academic title. It's like every word tries to undo the one before. "Senior Lecturer, advanced assistant professor"

Sigh... another academic project website turned into an advert for online gambling. Give me 90s html not updated in decades over this anyday.

Love the style of this paper. The "nativist argument" has been excluded from this list though, which has seen a massive popularization in the last decade by the populist right. One may argue it's not part of academic discourse, but it sure is part of political discourse on low fertility.

Consider joining us in beautiful Bologna for the largest gathering of population scientists in Europe… It is also a wonderful opportunity for those of us who are based outside of Europe to catch up with the latest demographic developments in the old continent. Hope to see you there!

Health demographers 📣 Calling for submissions to our w. @timriffe1.bsky.social Healthy Life Expectancy methodology collection on @genus.bsky.social! We're seeking innovative approaches to statistical modelling and empirical analysis of health inequalities 📈 📆 Submission deadline: 01/06/26 🔗 Link 👇

Very nice details in this well thought out observation-expectaion plot. The color gradient declutters the graph by de-emphasizing deviations close to the expectation. Having the deviations as a filled area "integrates" them over time (which would make a lot of sense for excess/deficit deaths).

@mpidr.bsky.social Phd student José Andrade hit hacker news front page with a piece on stalling cohort life expectancy with coauthors Carlo Giovanni Camarda & Héctor Pifarré i Arola. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507...

I'll be there.

“With the ending of USAID support in February 2025, ICF has secured interim funding for continuing selected, but not all, Demographic and Health Survey Program services. Several donors and host countries are funding the completion of selected surveys” www.dhsprogram.com/Who-we-are/N...

Very pedagogical thread! Thank you!

The Vaupel-Zhang equality features in my recent publication on mortality selection and convergence in neonatal mortality. JimV mentioned that he'd like this equation inscribed on his tombstone. It's a super general consequence of unobserved heterogeneous mortality, his speciality. Let me show you:

Proud to announce this year's European Demographer Awards! They go to Julia Hellstrand @juliahellstrand.bsky.social ‬ (Helsinki), Cosmo Strozza @cosmostrozza.bsky.social (Odense) and Éva Beaujouan @fertdem.bsky.social (Vienna). More: population-europe.eu/network/news... Congratulations!

Taylor's law holds for heterogeneity in the risk of neonatal death. As the average death rate in a cohort of newborns declines over the first month of life, the variance of death rates declines as well in a power-law fashion. Read more in my piece on post-natal mortality selection and convergence.

Kitagawa's decomposition uses the product rule for finite differences. Thus it applies to every demographic statistic expressible as a difference of weighted sums. Below, I use it to decompose changes in the variance of mortality rates into mortality selection and convergence components.

Below is the corrected version of something I tweeted this morning. I feel bad. I worked on the paper for 6 years, only to get every key word wrong while promoting it in the original tweet. Don't tweet while distracted.

Average mortality rates are a horrible measure of typical mortality during the first weeks of life. On the day of birth modal mortality is 189 times lower than average mortality. Read more in my recent piece on selection in neonatal mortality.

Hidden population heterogeneity: Using highly stratified neonatal cohort lifetables @jschoeley.com shows how mortality selection acts on the observed distribution of frailties and provides a test for the selection hypothesis of "ontogenescence". www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...

In this piece in honour of Jim Vaupel I pull the veil from hidden heterogeneity. I show how the observed distribution of frailties changes in a cohort of newborns over the first month of life and quantify mortality selection and its impact on the age pattern of neonate mortality. Fully reproducible.

I've been in an ongoing conversation with several other demographers about birth rate panic and what we can do about it. We've written this, with @karenguzzo.bsky.social and Shelley Clark. More to come! theconversation.com/fears-that-f...

Estimating recent trends in alcohol sales in the United Kingdom from alcohol duty revenue buff.ly/7AZpCDW @victimofmaths.bsky.social @jschoeley.com

Everything in mortality is a tempo effect. Let me walk you through my recent work on "A convolution formulation of mortality displacement" a.k.a. "Lifetime lost from time series of counts", last shown at Nordic Demographic Symposium. Happy to give invited talks. www.jschoeley.com/events/2025-...

Learned so much this week doing this course! Highly recommend it!Completed the week with this plot version from my project about Shared Lifetime in 1950 and 2023

I've got a bit of a bias for multidimensional color scales and created this example to illustrate bivariate scales. Created using the biscale library. github.com/jschoeley/ph... Let me know of more demographic bivariate choropleth maps.

Congratulations @polizzan.bsky.social. Recently @mpbergeron.bsky.social pitched me her idea why e0 growth rates should decline almost as a mathematical certainty. Maybe you two should talk.

Some exciting Monday afternoon reading here - Jonas Schöley and I have a new study in @addictionjournal.bsky.social using UK data on alcohol duty revenue to examine trends in alcohol sales and how these have changed since the start of the pandemic. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...