In 1950, the United States Census Bureau estimated that approximately 2,300 Americans were aged 100 or older. The total population of the country at the time was approximately 152 million, which made centenarians one of the rarest possible demographic categories — approximately one in every 66,000 Americans had reached the age. By 1990, the centenarian count had risen to approximately 37,000. By 2020, it had reached approximately 92,000. By 2024, it had passed 101,000. The trajectory has been steep and accelerating, and the demographic shift now visible in the centenarian numbers is one of the larger long-term changes in the structure of the American population — a category that was statistically negligible at the end of World War II is now projected to become, within the lifetimes of most people reading this, a substantial demographic constituency in its own right.

According to the Pew Research Center’s January 2024 analysis of Census Bureau projections, the US centenarian population is projected to more than quadruple from approximately 101,000 in 2024 to approximately 422,000 by 2054 — meaning that within the next 30 years, the proportion of Americans aged 100 or older will rise from approximately 0.03 percent of the population to approximately 0.1 percent. This is the official Census base-case projection. Higher-end estimates developed by demographic researchers — including the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society — have projected substantially higher numbers under more optimistic mortality-improvement scenarios, with some estimates exceeding 1.8 million US centenarians by mid-century and substantially larger numbers by 2100. The range between the Census base case and the higher-end projections is large, and the actual outcome will depend on whether mortality improvements at older ages continue at recent rates, accelerate, or plateau.

What is driving the projected growth

The proximate driver of centenarian growth is not improving mortality among the young or middle-aged — those mortality rates are already very low and have only modest room to fall. The driver is sharply declining mortality among nonagenarians: people aged 90 to 99 who, in previous generations, would typically have died before reaching 100. The mortality rate among 90-year-olds has been falling steadily across developed countries for decades, with each successive cohort of nonagenarians surviving slightly longer than the previous one. The result is that the share of any given birth cohort that eventually reaches 100 has been rising, and the absolute number of centenarians is rising even faster because the population at risk (the 90-year-olds in the country) has also been growing rapidly.

Per a CEOWORLD analysis of the global centenarian surge, the same pattern is visible internationally. The United Nations estimated approximately 722,000 centenarians worldwide in 2024 and projects that the number will rise to approximately 4 million by 2054 — a nearly six-fold global increase in 30 years. By mid-century, the largest national centenarian populations are projected to be China (approximately 767,000), the United States (approximately 422,000), India, Japan, and Thailand, with several Southeast Asian countries and parts of southern Europe showing particularly rapid centenarian growth on a per-capita basis. Japan, currently the country with the world’s highest median age, is projected to have approximately 40 centenarians per 10,000 people by 2054 — meaning that roughly one in every 250 Japanese residents will be aged 100 or older. Thailand is projected to have an even higher ratio, at approximately 49 per 10,000.

The contested longer-term projections

The substantive disagreement among demographers is not about whether centenarian numbers will rise — that is now essentially settled — but about how far they will rise, and how soon a majority of births in low-mortality countries will produce people who eventually reach 100. The optimistic position, associated with the demographer James Vaupel and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, holds that life expectancy in the most advanced countries has been increasing by approximately three months per year for the past 150 years and shows no clear sign of slowing — and that this trajectory implies that the majority of children born in low-mortality countries today will live to see their hundredth birthday. The skeptical position, associated most prominently with the American demographer S. Jay Olshansky and his collaborators, holds that life expectancy gains are now slowing substantially in the United States and other developed countries, that the easy mortality reductions from infectious disease control, smoking declines, and cardiovascular medicine have largely been achieved, and that further gains will be substantially harder to obtain.

The empirical evidence for the slowdown position has become more visible in recent years. US life expectancy peaked at approximately 78.9 years in 2014 and then declined — partly because of the opioid crisis, partly because of rising obesity-related mortality, partly because of COVID-19 mortality during the pandemic, and partly because of slowing gains in cardiovascular medicine. The current US life expectancy of approximately 76 years is substantially below the trajectory that the Vaupel projections would have predicted. As covered by a foundational MacArthur Foundation Research Network paper on demographic forecasts for the United States in the 21st century, the higher-end centenarian projections depend on assuming that the recent slowdown is temporary and that the longer-run Vaupel-style trajectory will resume. Whether it does is one of the central empirical questions in contemporary demography, and the answer will substantially affect both the centenarian counts in 2054 and the much larger projections for 2100.

The maximum lifespan question

As reported by a 2021 Bayesian analysis published in Demographic Research by Michael Pearce and Adrian Raftery at the University of Washington, the related question of what the maximum human lifespan will reach by 2100 is approachable with statistical methods even where the underlying biology is uncertain. The Pearce-Raftery analysis modelled the existing distribution of supercentenarians (people aged 110 or older) and the projected growth of that population through the rest of the century, and estimated that there is greater than 99 percent probability that the current record human lifespan — Jeanne Calment of France, who died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days — will be broken before 2100. They estimate an 89 percent probability that someone will reach age 126, a 44 percent probability that someone will reach 128, and a 13 percent probability that someone will reach 130. These projections are not predictions about the typical lifespan but about the extreme tail of the survival distribution, which depends on the same nonagenarian mortality declines that drive the centenarian numbers.

The deeper question that the centenarian projections raise is the relationship between living longer and living well. The available evidence on healthspan — the proportion of life spent in good health, rather than in disability or substantial decline — suggests that healthspan has been increasing more slowly than lifespan. The result is that the gap between the two has been widening: people are living longer, but with more years of substantial disability, more years of cognitive decline, and more years of dependence on caregivers and the healthcare system. The economic implications are substantial. The current pension systems, healthcare systems, and family structures of most developed countries were built around assumptions about average lifespan and the typical duration of post-retirement life that no longer hold. The institutional response, across most of the developed world, has been slower than the underlying demographic shift. Whether the eventual centenarians — including, possibly, a substantial fraction of the children born this year — will arrive at their hundredth birthdays in good health, in supported decline, or somewhere in between will depend on whether the gains of the coming decades are made primarily in extending lifespan or primarily in extending healthspan. The two trajectories produce very different futures.

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Frances Gerety was a copywriter at the Philadelphia agency N.W. Ayer & Son when she sat down late one night in 1947, exhausted, and scrawled four words on a notepad before going to bed: A diamond is forever. She nearly forgot them by morning. The line would run on De Beers advertisements for decades, get crowned the greatest advertising slogan of the twentieth century by Advertising Age in 1999, and rewire the global engagement ritual so completely that the diamond ring became something close to a biological assumption. Gerety herself, who wrote the most successful marriage proposal in commercial history, lived alone and never married.

She worked at N.W. Ayer for her entire career, from 1943 until her retirement in 1973, on a single account: De Beers. For three decades, almost every piece of copy that sold a diamond in the United States passed through her typewriter. She was the only woman in the agency’s copy department when she was hired, and she stayed the only woman on the De Beers account for most of that run.

The night the line arrived

The story Gerety told later was unglamorous. She had a presentation the next morning and had not yet written a tagline for the new campaign. She was tired. She put her head down on her desk and asked, by her own account, for some help from above. Four words came. She wrote them on a slip of paper and went to sleep.

The agency’s creative director was unimpressed at first. The grammar bothered people — are forever, surely, not is. Gerety held the line. The singular verb gave the sentence the weight of a proverb instead of a sales pitch, and that was the whole point. De Beers signed off. The slogan ran for the first time in 1948.

What the line was actually doing

To understand why the four words mattered, you have to understand what De Beers was up against in 1947. Diamond sales had collapsed during the Great Depression. The average American engagement ring in the 1930s contained no diamond at all, or a small chip mounted in a thin band. The South African mining cartel, sitting on enormous stockpiles, hired N.W. Ayer in 1938 to do something unprecedented: not advertise a brand, but invent a custom.

The campaign that Gerety inherited and then defined had two jobs. First, convince young men that a diamond ring was the only acceptable way to propose. Second, convince young women that a ring without a diamond meant they were not truly loved. The slogan she wrote in 1947 accomplished both at once. If a diamond is forever, then so is the marriage it represents — and so is the reason you cannot resell it, which was the quiet commercial masterpiece of the line. A diamond you would never part with is a diamond that would never flood the secondhand market and crash De Beers’ carefully managed prices.

By the 1950s, the majority of American brides received a diamond engagement ring. The number kept climbing. By the late 1990s the practice had become standard in the U.S. and had spread to Japan, where the diamond engagement ring had been essentially unknown before Ayer’s campaign arrived in the 1960s. Within two decades, a majority of Japanese brides were also wearing diamonds.

The greatest slogan of the century

In 1999, as advertising trade publications compiled their end-of-century lists, Advertising Age ranked the top slogans of the twentieth century. A diamond is forever took first place. The judges noted that no other slogan had so thoroughly created the market it served. Most advertising sells a product into an existing desire. Gerety’s line manufactured the desire.

She was in her eighties and watched the announcement from her home in Philadelphia. She had retired three decades earlier. The line was still running, unchanged, on every De Beers campaign worldwide.

The copywriter herself

Frances Gerety was born in Philadelphia in 1916. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and joined N.W. Ayer in 1943, at a moment when wartime labor shortages had cracked open copywriting rooms to women who would have been turned away five years earlier. She kept the job after the war, which was less common, and her colleagues described her as quiet, professional, and obsessively careful about the cadence of a sentence.

She lived in a small house in Philadelphia. She kept dogs. She traveled. She did not, by every available account, ever come close to marrying. She told a colleague once, with characteristic dryness, that she had spent her career persuading other women to do something she had decided against.

The irony nobody made her explain

The temptation, looking back, is to read the gap between Gerety’s professional output and her private life as some kind of secret wound. The concept of achievement wounds tends to frame high-output creative careers as compensations for absences in personal life, and biographers love that frame because it gives a tidy arc. Gerety’s contemporaries did not describe her that way. They described someone who liked her work, liked her independence, and treated the De Beers account as a professional puzzle rather than a personal project.

Building on the distinction between achievement and accomplishment — achievement as the metric, accomplishment as the internal sense that the work was worth doing — Gerety, by every account from people who worked with her, had both, and never seemed to need her own life to mirror the lives she was selling.

The pull to read her biography as ironic comes from how people interpret others’ contradictions. Audiences see a single salient fact — copywriter sells marriage, copywriter never marries — and lock it into a narrative shape because the shape is more memorable than the messy truth. The truth is that Gerety was a working professional in a creative field who happened to be very good at one specific assignment and happened to live a private life that did not match the assignment.

Why the slogan stuck

Linguists and advertising scholars have spent decades trying to explain why four words written at the end of a long workday became one of the most replicated commercial sentences in history. Some of it is the grammar — the singular is, which Gerety insisted on, makes the sentence sound like an axiom rather than a claim. Some of it is the rhythm: three short syllables, a pause, three more. Some of it is the way the line refuses to mention the buyer, the seller, the price, or the act of purchase.

The slogans which embed themselves most deeply in memory tend to function as small proverbs — sentences that feel pre-existing rather than written. They borrow the cadence of folk wisdom. Gerety’s line does this almost perfectly. It sounds like something your grandmother might have said, even though your grandmother probably first heard it from a magazine ad in 1948.

The brevity of four-word phrases sits inside the comfortable range of working memory and can be retrieved with almost no effort. They become available as a kind of mental shortcut, which is exactly what an engagement ring shopper wants when standing in front of a jewelry counter trying to justify a purchase that costs two months of salary — another rule of thumb, incidentally, that N.W. Ayer invented.

The afterlife of four words

Frances Gerety died in 1999, the same year Advertising Age named her line the slogan of the century. She was 83. The obituaries described her as a pioneering woman in advertising and noted, almost as a footnote, that she had never married. De Beers, by then a global conglomerate, kept the slogan running. It still runs.

The diamond engagement ring, which did not exist as a near-universal custom before her campaign, is now worn by the majority of brides in the United States, Japan, China, and a growing list of other markets. Geologists will tell you that diamonds are not, technically, forever — under high enough temperature and pressure they convert back to graphite, and on long enough timescales even the stones in a setting are slowly losing carbon atoms. The line was always a small lie.

Gerety knew. She had written it as a closing argument, not a scientific claim. She went home to her small house in Philadelphia, fed her dogs, and went to sleep, having that morning convinced several million strangers to spend several months of income on a piece of carbon she would not, herself, ever wear.

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A copywriter named Frances Gerety working at the Philadelphia advertising agency N.W. Ayer created the line A Diamond Is Forever for a client called De Beers, the South African mining cartel. The slogan would run on De Beers advertising for decades, and the campaign it anchored would invent, almost from scratch, the idea that an engagement ring should cost a man two months’ salary — a number that had no basis in tradition, etiquette, or jewelry industry practice.

The figure started smaller. In the early twentieth century, diamond engagement rings were relatively uncommon among American brides, and rings cost less than they would later.

By the 1980s, De Beers had pushed the American benchmark to two months. In Japan, where the company began advertising in the 1960s, it set the figure at three.

The slogan that ran for 75 years

Gerety worked at N.W. Ayer for her entire career. A Diamond Is Forever became one of the most recognized advertising slogans of the twentieth century. The line did two things at once. It implied that a diamond, like the marriage it symbolised, was eternal — and it discouraged resale, because a stone you would never part with did not need a secondary market that might reveal how little used diamonds were actually worth.

De Beers did not sell diamonds directly to consumers. It sold rough stones to a tightly controlled group of cutters and wholesalers, and it needed to keep demand high enough to absorb the supply coming out of mines in South Africa, Botswana, and later Russia. Advertising was the lever.

Inventing a tradition that had not existed

The two-months-salary rule was not handed down from a Victorian etiquette guide. It was tested in print ads through the 1970s and 1980s, raised from one month to two as inflation and rising incomes allowed, and reinforced through magazine spreads featuring couples whose ring size was implicitly tied to the groom’s professional success. The company eventually stopped suggesting specific salary multiples in U.S. advertising, but by then the figure had embedded itself in popular memory as if it had always been there.

The campaign worked because it tied a luxury purchase to a social fear. A man who spent less risked appearing cheap or uncommitted; a man who spent more signalled devotion. The metric was self-reinforcing because almost no one resold the ring afterward, so the market never had to absorb the secondhand stones that would have exposed the inflated retail markup.

Repeated messaging can convert a manufactured benchmark into a perceived custom, particularly when the purchase is rare, emotionally loaded, and hard to comparison-shop.

The Japan campaign of 1967

Japan was the harder case. Diamonds were largely absent from Japanese weddings before De Beers began its campaign. Engagement gifts followed a traditional custom called yuino, which involved exchanges of symbolic items between the two families. Brides did not typically wear rings. Diamonds, when they appeared at all, were associated with Western excess and were considered ostentatious.

De Beers worked with advertising agencies to change that. The campaign placed diamond rings on young Japanese women photographed in Western settings — skiing, sailing, driving sports cars — surrounded by Western boyfriends and husbands. The visual argument was that diamonds belonged to a modern, internationally mobile, economically successful Japan, and that a man who proposed without one was clinging to a prewar past.

The salary benchmark in Japanese ads was set at three months’ salary, higher than the American figure. Japanese household savings rates were high at the time, and the campaign calibrated the ask accordingly.

How fast the custom took

The numbers shifted faster than almost any comparable case in consumer history. When the campaign launched in the late 1960s, few Japanese brides received diamond engagement rings. Within a few years, the figure began climbing rapidly. By the early 1980s, the majority of Japanese brides were receiving diamond engagement rings. By the late 1990s, the practice had become widespread, and Japan had become the second-largest diamond market in the world after the United States.

Within roughly thirty years, a country with no diamond tradition had adopted one as if it were ancient. Older relatives at weddings began to assume their granddaughters would receive a stone. Wedding magazines printed guidance on ring selection alongside articles on traditional kimono. The yuino ceremony itself often absorbed the ring as one of its exchanged items, blending the new custom into the old form so seamlessly that the seam disappeared.

Why the persuasion worked

Repeated exposure to a single visual framing — a young couple, a small velvet box, a specific cut of stone — establishes the diamond as the default object in the scene. Once the default is set, alternatives feel like deliberate refusals rather than neutral choices.

Purchases tied to identity transitions — marriage, parenthood, graduation — are especially susceptible to manufactured tradition, because the buyer is also performing a social role for an audience of family and peers.

The Japanese campaign exploited that exactly. A bride showing the ring to her mother was not just displaying a stone; she was confirming that the marriage met a modern standard.

The royal accelerant

One outside event amplified the campaign more than any single ad. In 1981, Prince Charles proposed to Lady Diana Spencer with a 12-carat oval Ceylon sapphire surrounded by 14 diamonds — a ring that broke generations of royal tradition by being chosen from a commercial Garrard catalogue rather than commissioned bespoke. The wedding drew a global television audience, including a substantial viewership in Japan, where the broadcast aired with translation.

Diana’s ring was not a solitaire diamond, but the broader visual — a Western royal bride wearing a serious gemstone — fed directly into the framing De Beers had been building. Sales accelerated in both markets through the 1980s.

What the campaign is doing now

The structure has begun to wobble. Lab-grown diamonds, chemically identical to mined stones, now sell at substantially lower prices than natural equivalents, and younger buyers in the United States and East Asia have proved willing to choose them. De Beers spent decades insisting that synthetics were not real diamonds, then launched its own lab-grown brand called Lightbox, and has since pulled back.

In October 2025, the company launched a campaign called Desert Diamonds, its largest in a decade, aimed at re-establishing the cultural premium of natural stones. A separate rebrand of the De Beers jewelry line features the model Adwoa Aboah and a new Paris flagship, framing natural diamonds as heritage objects rather than commodity purchases.

Japan’s diamond market has softened since its peak, partly as marriage patterns have shifted. The three-months-salary rule is now treated by many younger couples as a vintage idea rather than a binding one. The custom is no longer growing. It is also not disappearing — the wedding ring section of any department store in Tokyo still displays solitaires under the same lighting used in the original campaign.

What Frances Gerety left behind

The slogan Gerety wrote had been printed in more languages than almost any other piece of commercial copy in history, and the salary multiples it anchored — two months in America, three in Japan — had reshaped how hundreds of millions of people thought about the moment of proposal.

The diamonds themselves were chemically the same carbon they had always been. The forever was the advertising.

The post The idea that a man should spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring was invented by De Beers marketing — in Japan the campaign set the figure at three, rewriting wedding customs where diamond engagement rings had barely existed appeared first on Space Daily.

The self-help shelf in any bookshop is a monument to overcomplication. Forty-seven habits, twelve rules, seven levels, a morning routine that begins at half past four and involves cold water and a gratitude journal. I have read a depressing number of these, mostly in airports, and retained almost none of it past the departure gate.

Then Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, was asked on a Reddit thread in 2012 what drives him, and he gave an answer short enough to fit on the back of a receipt. Two philosophies, he said. Know more today about the world than you knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You would be surprised how far that gets you.

My first reaction was the one you are probably having. Lovely. Goes nicely on a mug. My second reaction, a few years later, was that the man had calmly described the only two things that have ever worked for me, and that the second one once stopped me making the stupidest decision of my career.

Know more today than you knew yesterday

The first one is the scientific method pointed at your own life, and it is far more modest than it sounds.

It does not ask you to be a genius, or to ever finish. It asks you to be slightly less wrong tonight than you were this morning. That is more or less the whole engine of science. Nobody in a serious lab is trying to be right in some final, permanent way. They are trying to be marginally less mistaken than the last person, write it down, and let someone else chip a bit further along.

The humility runs deeper than people outside science tend to assume, too. We have been studying gravity for three centuries and still only know Newton’s constant to three significant figures. Around ninety-five percent of the universe is made of things we have politely named dark matter and dark energy, mostly so we do not have to say out loud that we have very little idea what they are. The best-informed species on the only planet known to carry one spends most of its day confidently not knowing things.

I got this wrong for years in a particular way. I thought “know more” meant collect facts and deploy them to win. I was the man at the table with the correction loaded and ready. What I was doing was the precise opposite of the rule, because a person busy being right learns nothing. The truer version is duller and harder. Assume, every single day, that there is a fact you do not yet have. Above all about a person.

The cook I nearly sacked

That stops being abstract very quickly in a kitchen.

Years ago I had a line cook, a quiet lad called Tomas, who started arriving late. Ten minutes, then twenty, then a morning he missed altogether. In the economy of a busy kitchen that is close to a capital offence. The prep does not do itself, and one slow start poisons the entire service behind it. I had the conversation drafted in my head, the regretful, businesslike one that ends with a final pay packet. By the cold numbers, he had to go.

What stopped me was a flat, almost accidental question. I asked him, with no great warmth, what was actually going on. And it came out that his mother had been taken into a hospital on the far side of the city, that he was sitting with her until the small hours, and then walking ninety minutes to my door because the night buses did not connect and the fare, on a cook’s wages, was a genuine decision every morning.

None of that was visible from where I stood, which was the whole point. I had a full and confident model of Tomas, the unreliable cook, and it was missing the single fact that explained all of it. I knew less than I believed I did, which is the standard human condition and the exact thing the first rule is trying to beat out of you.

So I did something small. I shifted his start to the evening, which suited the kitchen anyway, and stopped docking him for the lost mornings. It cost me close to nothing. He stayed four years, became the steadiest pair of hands in the building, and covered for me more times than I can count when my own life later fell apart. You would be surprised, as the man said, how far that got me.

Lessen the suffering of others

People hear the second philosophy as the soft one. The charity bit, bolted on after the clever bit, to make the clever bit look kind. I think that is exactly the wrong way round.

They are the same engine. Knowing more about Tomas was worthless as trivia. Its only value was that it let me take a little weight off him at almost no cost to me. And easing what he carried was not me playing the saint. It was the most clear-headed thing I did that year, because it kept a good cook and bought a loyalty that no bonus on earth would have. Knowledge without the second philosophy is just cleverness, which is cold and gets you avoided at parties. Kindness without the first is good intentions fired blindfold, which mostly miss the target. You need the two of them aimed together.

That is what Tyson tucks into that last offhand line. He does not promise you enlightenment, or wealth, or a flat stomach by June. He promises only that two ordinary habits will carry you “surprisingly far,” which may be the single most honest sentence in the entire self-improvement trade. Nobody can tell you how far. You would be surprised. That is the whole claim, and it happens to be true.

I walked away from the restaurants a few years after Tomas, and I have since forgotten most of what I once knew about margins and stock rotation and the correct way to close down a kitchen at midnight. What stayed was the picture of a tired young man crossing a sleeping city on foot to stand at my stove, and the small, unheroic discovery that the cheapest thing I ever did, ask one question and move one shift, turned out to be the cleverest entry in the books. Two rules, typed into a website by a stargazer at his keyboard. They really will carry a person an absurd distance, though their author had the good manners not to say how far. He left you to walk it and find out.

The post Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” appeared first on Space Daily.