Article
Long-term trends in the longevity of scientific elites: evidence from the British and the Russian academies of science.
Wave-shaped changes in the life span of Russian citizes remains mainly unexplained, but the last ten years provide some reasons to think that increase in the funding of the health care is accompanied by increase in the lenght of life
Linear increase in the best-practice (maximal among countries) life expectancy, known as the Oeppen– Vaupel line, is the most demonstrative image of longevity progress. This study is devoted to the analysis of trends in best-practice life expectancy across cohorts born in 1870 to 1950. Other than the conventional period life expectancy, cohort life expectancy measures the lifetime of real individuals from the population under consideration. Since mortality is mostly decreasing with time, period life expectancy in a given year is usually lower than cohort life expectancy for people born in the same year. The corresponding gap between period and cohort life expectancies increases with time. Our analysis is based on data for 24 developed countries from the Human Mortality Database for the period 1870 to 2008. To estimate life expectancy for non-extinct cohorts, we apply the Lee–Carter model to extrapolate mortality rates until the year 2050. The annual increase in the best-practice cohort life expectancy across cohorts born in 1870 to 1950 is 0,43 year, while the annual increment in the period life expectancy across the same range of years is equal to 0,28 year. The best-practice cohort life expectancy has increased from 53,7 years in 1870 to 83,8 years in 1950. During this time the gap between period and cohort life expectancies has increased from 1,2 to 10,3 years. Cohorts born in 1920 to 1950 will live longer than one can expect by looking at respective period mortality patterns. For these cohorts, the longest part of their additionally gained lifetime will be spent at ages 65 and older. This substantially changes the distribution of human lifetime among different stages of the life cycle.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.