Abstract
Humanity has arrived at a dramatically different level of well-being in 2019 than that which existed 50 years ago or that which characterized people worldwide at the outset of the twentieth century. And the current century is still young and continues to reveal itself daily. The advances we have the privilege to witness reflect changes in the quality of life of people everywhere, and the forward momentum we would like to focus on continues the promise of even more significant advances in the sciences, medicine, and technology in the decades just ahead. Although distinct drivers for both contemporary and future progress in well-being are not easy to discern with clarity, the rich tapestry of the multiple stakeholders and multisector collaborations needed to bring about these changes is not. We already know the mix of public–private partnerships that are needed to bring about dramatic changes in all areas of collective life (Estes & Zhou, 2014).
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Notes
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A population pyramid, also called an “age-sex pyramid,” is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population (typically that of a country or region of the world), which forms the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing. This tool can be used to visualize the age of a particular population. It is also used in ecology to determine the overall age distribution of a population, an indication of the reproductive capabilities and likelihood of the continuation of a species (Wikipedia, 2018).
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Estes, R.J. (2019). The Past, The Present. In: The Social Progress of Nations Revisited, 1970–2020. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15907-8_2
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