Aging Populations and Social Challenges. Paper presented on IIASA's 20th Anniversary

IIASA celebrated its twentieth anniversary on May 12-13 with its fourth general conference, IIASA '92: An International Conference on the Challenges to Systems Analysis in the Nineties and Beyond. The conference focused on the relations between environment and development and on studies that integrate the methods and findings of several disciplines. The role of systems analysis, a method especially suited to taking account of the linkages between phenomena and of the hierarchical organization of the natural and social world, was also assessed, taking account of the implications this has for IIASA's research approach and activities. This paper is one of six IIASA Collaborative Papers published as part of the report on the conference, an earlier instalment of which was Science and Sustainability, published in 1992. If there is anyone who writes with authority on pensions and the problems that all industrial countries will confront in at most the next 20 years it is Professor van Praag. He has been far ahead of his time in pointing out the fatal defect hidden in the present arrangement of social security. It was introduced and is now maintained and defended less from the viewpoint of long-term workability than for its short term convenience. The system I refer to is called Pay As You Go (PAYG), wherein no reserve is maintained; each year's tax collections (necessarily from those working) are paid out that same year to those retired. The convenience of PAYG was that as soon as announced it could start to pay retirees almost irrespective of the amounts they had contributed. It necessarily reduces saving in the economy, turns one generation against the preceding generation, and has other incidental ill-effects, but these are not what concern van Praag and Dalen most. What they fear is its instability in the face of demographic fluctuations, specifically the day when the postwar baby boom starts to retire. Subsequent to the baby boom of the 1950s birth rates went down and stayed down, so that the cohorts to pay the pensions will be relatively small, just as the cohorts coming to collect them will attain record size. Beyond that fact, caused by the changing birth rate, is the decline in mortality, the increased fraction of each cohort living to extreme old age. What happens when these facts require that payroll taxes go up to the 25 percent of all wages that will ultimately be necessary if the retired are to have social security incomes equal to 80 percent of the average wage? PAYG depends on each generation as it makes its payments trusting that the next generation will continue do the same; once doubt starts to spread the fragility of the whole system is revealed. We are told that the system is supported by a "contract between the generations" but the "contract" is metaphorical, as will be revealed in a few years when the crunch comes. Effects go beyond the social security system; they create a wholly artificial and unnecessary conflict between the generations. With PAYG a shortsighted younger generation can become alarmed at what is ultimately good news for all - the rapidly growing number of octogenarians and people even older - and be tempted to vote against further use of their taxes for research into and therapy of the chronic diseases of old age. But you do not require my explanation of the problem of PAYG. You not only have it better expressed by van Praag and Dalen, but they provide a remedy, one that will be the more painless the sooner it is initiated

An Unusual Case of Human Rabies Thought to be of Chiropteran Origin

On 21 February 1970 a White male patient died in the H. F. Verwoerd Hospital, Pretoria after a 5-day illness diagnosed clinically as rabies. The source of exposure to the disease was reported to be a bat bite sustained approximately 5 weeks earlier. Fluorescent antibody (FA) tests using standard conjugate on the deceased's brain were negative but Negri bodies were found histologically in the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum. A strain of rabies virus not demonstrable with standard FA conjugate was isolated from brain tissue. Specific FA conjugate prepared from this virus revealed the presence of typical rabies fluorescent inclusions in the brain of the deceased

Aggregated dynamic demand equations for specialistic-outpatient medical care:(Estimated from a time-series of cross-sections)

In this paper a dynamic model is presented which describes the development of the demand for specialistic medical care in The Netherlands, during the period 1960-1972. The "regionally correlated, time-wise auto-regressive" model is consistently estimated from a time-series of cross-sections, using a modified Aitken estimator. The dependent variables are the number of publicly insured patients referred from general care to specialistic care, and the amount of care consumed per patient referred. As independent variables we took demographic factors, the supply of different levels of medical care and the insurance system. The estimation results show a.o. important substitution possibilities between general and specialistic care, and a significant influence of supply and supply-related variables on the demand for specialistic care.</p

Monitoring ethnic minorities in the Netherlands

Item does not contain fulltextThe article first summarises the history of ethnic minority policy in the Netherlands and the development of the ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘allochthonous’ categories, which are peculiar in comparative perspective in emphasising socio-economic disadvantage as a constitutive dimension of minority status and in setting the minority question within the broader Dutch political principle of ‘pillarisation’. The article then examines the use of statistics in public policy, in a context where the national census has been discontinued since 1971, focusing more specifically on the case of education, where major statistical efforts have been devoted to identifying patterns of disadvantage and integration. Finally, the article briefly examines current debates on the situation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands in the context of growing questioning of established Dutch models of minority policy.13 p

Feedback from the heart: emotional learning and memory is controlled by cardiac cycle, interoceptive accuracy and personality

Feedback processing is critical to trial-and-error learning. Here, we examined whether interoceptive signals concerning the state of cardiovascular arousal influence the processing of reinforcing feedback during the learning of ‘emotional’ face-name pairs, with subsequent effects on retrieval. Participants (N = 29) engaged in a learning task of face-name pairs (fearful, neutral, happy faces). Correct and incorrect learning decisions were reinforced by auditory feedback, which was delivered either at cardiac systole (on the heartbeat, when baroreceptors signal the contraction of the heart to the brain), or at diastole (between heartbeats during baroreceptor quiescence). We discovered a cardiac influence on feedback processing that enhanced the learning of fearful faces in people with heightened interoceptive ability. Individuals with enhanced accuracy on a heartbeat counting task learned fearful face-name pairs better when feedback was given at systole than at diastole. This effect was not present for neutral and happy faces. At retrieval, we also observed related effects of personality: First, individuals scoring higher for extraversion showed poorer retrieval accuracy. These individuals additionally manifested lower resting heart rate and lower state anxiety, suggesting that attenuated levels of cardiovascular arousal in extraverts underlies poorer performance. Second, higher extraversion scores predicted higher emotional intensity ratings of fearful faces reinforced at systole. Third, individuals scoring higher for neuroticism showed higher retrieval confidence for fearful faces reinforced at diastole. Our results show that cardiac signals shape feedback processing to influence learning of fearful faces, an effect underpinned by personality differences linked to psychophysiological arousal