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The Low Mortality of a Learned Society

La faible mortalité d’une société savante

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Abstract

This study addresses the mortality of the members of a learned society. Following the literature on the social gradient of mortality, members of a learned society should exhibit much lower death rates than other social groups. We use biographical records from the members of the Austrian Academy of Sciences between 1847 and 2005 and compare their mortality to Austrian life table death rates of the entire population and the population with tertiary education, respectively. We find that the members of the Austrian Academy of Sciences experience far fewer deaths than if they were subject to the average Austrian life table mortality. The mortality differential even persists when comparing to the Austrian population with tertiary education, though to a smaller extent. Moreover, the mortality differential between the members of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian population has widened over time, particularly since the mid-twentieth century.

Résumé

Cette étude s’intéresse à la mortalité des membres d’une société savante. D’après la littérature sur le gradient social de la mortalité, les membres d’une société savante devraient bénéficier de taux de mortalité beaucoup plus faibles que les autres groupes sociaux. Nous faisons appel aux données biographiques des membres de l’Académie des Sciences Autrichienne entre 1847 et 2005, et comparons leur mortalité à celle de l’ensemble de la population, puis à celle de la couche la plus instruite de la population. Il apparaît que les membres de l’Académie des Sciences ont une mortalité beaucoup plus basse que celle de la population générale. Le différentiel persiste, quoique de manière plus réduite, quand on effectue la comparaison avec la couche la plus instruite de la population. Par ailleurs, l’écart par rapport à l’ensemble de la population s’est agrandi avec le temps, particulièrement depuis le milieu du vingtième siècle.

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Notes

  1. Being elected as a member in a learned society is commonly seen as an award for the scientific excellence of the new member. Recent research on the longevity of award winners, e.g. ‘Oscar’ (Redelmeier and Singh 2001) and Nobel prize winners (Rablen and Oswald 2007), shows a mortality advantage of the winners relative to peers who are nominated but unsuccessful of four and two years of life expectancy, respectively. The authors argue that the relative higher survival can be attributed merely to the additional status associated with winning the award since the nominees and award winners are relatively similar with respect to education and income. A re-examination of the survival of the ‘Oscar’ winners (Sylvestre et al. 2006), however, yields a longevity difference of only one year (instead of the original four years) between ‘Oscar’ winners and less successful peers which is not statistical significant!

  2. The statute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences specifies that persons may be elected as honorary members for their excellent services to science, the state, or the people.

  3. Until 2005, there were only 46 female corresponding members; twenty of them resided in Austria. Among the latter, eight became full members later and one was elected as an honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

  4. A thorough description of the activities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1938–1945 can be found in Matis (1997).

  5. The Academy was founded in 1847 as Imperial Academy of Sciences of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (Huber 1897, p. 55). Hence, full and corresponding members were elected from all parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although there were regulations regarding the residence of full members in order that meetings could take place on a regular basis (see Footnote 7). However, as a consequence of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867, Hungarians were considered as foreigners (Burger 2000, p. 168), and, thus, Academicians residing in the Hungarian part of the dual monarchy have been recorded as corresponding members abroad ever since 1867. As the first life tables for the Austro-Hungarian Empire pertain to the late 1860s, we only consider Cisleithanian life tables for the mortality comparison.

  6. The death and census records were merged by date of birth, residential address, and family status of the deceased, since a personal identification number does not exist in Austria and names are deleted from census records. With this merging procedure, around 92% of the deaths in 1981/82 and 90% in 1991/92, respectively, could be linked to the corresponding census records (Doblhammer et al. 2005). In order to estimate death rates by occupational and educational category, the number of deaths have to be adjusted for the deaths that could not be linked to the census. In order to compute age-specific merging rates, the numbers of deaths by age group are estimated for the same time period as the linked death records from the age-specific monthly number of deaths of 1981/82 and 1991/92 (Statistics Austria 2006). Finally, age-specific death rates by occupational and educational category were derived by relating the adjusted number of deaths to the person-years of the population by education (Landler 2004) and occupation (Statistics Austria 2006). For retired people, their previous occupation was used.

  7. When the Academy was founded, the statute required that half of the full members had to live in Vienna or its suburbs, a principle which remained largely unchanged until the mid-twentieth century. In the second half of the past century, the Academy experienced several statutory increases in the number of members, but the minimum number of full members required to reside in Vienna or its suburbs remained fixed until the abolishment of this restriction in 2002.

  8. Within the history of the Academy, there were several changes in the byelaws affecting the number of members. Apart from the increase in the maximum number of members in 1848, 1898/99 (only corresponding members), 1925 (only full members) and 1991, age thresholds were introduced. In particular, the amendments of the byelaws in 1949 specified that full members aged 75 and above, while retaining their full membership rights, were no longer taken into account for the maximum number of members. In 1966 the latter rule started to be applied to all membership categories. Finally, the age threshold was lowered to 70 years in 1971. The introduction of the age thresholds in defining the maximum number of members has allowed a continuous increase in the number of members over the past decades (cf. Table 1).

  9. The life expectancy at age 60 was chosen for reasons of comparability; the availability of life expectancy estimates for the Austrian total population is best at age 60.

  10. The latter numbers constitute average life expectancies at age 50 from single-year life tables during the period 1970–95, for Denmark available in the Human Life Table Database (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research 2005) and for Austria in European Communities (2006).

  11. For instance in the period 1996–2005, the mean age at election was around 53 and 57 years for corresponding and full members, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

This article arose from a joint project on “The Age Dynamics of a Learned Society: The Austrian Academy of Sciences”, which was initiated by Gustav Feichtinger. I am greatly indebted to him and to Inga Freund, Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz and Fernando Riosmena, my collaborators within the project, for helpful advice, comments and assistance. Furthermore, I thank Elisabeth Lebensaft, Peter Urbanitsch, and Stefan Sienell for supplying me with detailed historical information. Many thanks to Roland Rau for patiently answering my numerous questions about the merging of death records and to Frank Landler, Anne Goujon, and Richard Gisser for their help in data collection. Moreover, I appreciate useful comments from Laurent Toulemon, Marc Luy, Vladimir Shkolnikov, Isabella Buber-Ennser, and the participants of the RTN workshop on "Mortality Trends, Longevity and Population Ageing " in Fiesole, January 13–14, 2006.

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  1. Vienna Institute of Demography, Wohllebengasse 10–12, Vienna, 1040, Austria

    Maria Winkler-Dworak

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Winkler-Dworak, M. The Low Mortality of a Learned Society. Eur J Population 24, 405–424 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-007-9148-0

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