Common adult longevity and compression of mortality: the M Project

Jean Marie Robine, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM)
Siu Lan K Cheung, Demographie et Sante
Shiro Horiuchi, Rockefeller University
Roger A. Thatcher, Former Director of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, London

The M Project - M for Mode - started in 2005 with the aim of studying the adult longevity to better understand the lengthening of adult life duration in contrast with the fall of infant and child mortality and the increase in life expectancy at birth. Specific targets deal with the assessment of the occurrence of the scenario of mortality compression, the shape of the distribution of adult life durations, their dispersion around the modal age at death (M), and the extreme values such as the maximum reported ages at death. Disentangling socio-economic inequalities (SES) in adult longevity from “limit” variability may be an important target in the future of the M-Group. Several papers have already been published; others are in press or in progress. They deal with actual data, formal demography and mechanisms of the compression of mortality. We propose to summarize our results for the general IUSSP conference.