One of the greatest achievements of the 20st and early 21st century, says British economist, author and professor Andrew J. Scott, has been increased human life expectancy, and with it, fewer children dying and more people living to be grandparents and even great-grandparents.
“And yet, I’d never met anyone who said, ‘Yeah, great stuff!’ It was more, ‘More old people being burdens because more pensions and care will be needed, etc.’”
The issue is, “we have medicalized old age and understated the capacity of older people; they were always considered frail, a problem,” he said. But it turns out increased life expectancy is “not just another bad-news story.”
In their bestselling book “The 100-Year Life,” Scott and co-author Lynda Gratton, both professors of economics at the London Business School, explore how living to 100 will have a profound effect on society and the economy and offers readers help in rethinking retirement, education, career and relationships. Published in 2016, it has sold more than 1 million copies globally.
Scott spoke at the recent Longevity Book Club event sponsored by Stanford University Center on Longevity on the occasion of the publication of his new book, “The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives.’’
As Scott writes about his new book, written solo, “Rather than thinking in terms of the needs of a rising number of older people, we must instead support the young and middle-aged to prepare differently for the longer futures they can expect.”
‘Surely We Can Do Better Than That’
In “The Longevity Imperative,” Scott outlines the innovations needed to make the most of longer lives. This includes “substantial changes to our health system, economy, and financial sector, as well as how we manage our careers, health, finances, and relationships,’’ he writes.
“Longevity is right up there with climate change in how it will profoundly affect us: and yet, there is a huge debate about how climate change will affect us but not the same debate about longevity. To be blunt, I wrote the new book because I felt that surely we can do better than that,’’ Scott said at the book club event.
Growing old is not a topic most people embrace, he said, largely because it’s often viewed as a state of decline. Asked by co-moderator Martha Deevy, associate chair of the Longevity Center, whether Scott’s business school students avoid talk of aging, Scott demurred.
“They’re particularly interested in health issues, because I think that they get it, they recognize that aging is a process. If you do things when you’re young it improves what happens in the next phase of life.’’
A Little Perspective
As of 2021, the average life expectancy of women and men, combined, in the United States was 76.1 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average life expectancy of American women is 79.1 years and men is 73.2 years. Covid deaths lowered the life expectancy of both women and men after 2020 by about 2.7 years.
In 1900, the average life expectancy of women in the United States was 48.3, and for men, 46.3. By 1924, the average life expectancy of American women was 61.5 and for men, 58.1, according to the University of California, Berkeley.
“The most important thing now is to age well. That didn’t used to be important when you had a low chance of getting into your 80s and 90s,’’ Scott said.
Asked by co-moderator Ken Stern, founder and chair of the Longevity Center, to define how one can age well, Scott said it’s a combination of self-determination, social equality and governmental support.
“In order to do the things we want to do, that requires resources and social opportunities to do it. It’s maintaining our health for as long as possible because the main threat to our health is aging-related diseases,” said Scott.
Productivity Dilemma
“The second thing, of course, is if you will be living for longer, you’ve got to be able to produce more resources over your lifetime, or you will see a falling standard. We have to be productive and that means working,” he said. “This requires having the right skills and opportunities,” he adds.
“But speaking as an economist, there’s a really big problem, which is, at 50 in America, 80% of people are working but by 65 that’s come down to about a third. And that drop in employment, I think is a really key policy priority for governments.”
Yet continuing to raise the state pension age “doesn’t solve the underlying problem we have,” said Scott. What’s more important, he said, are the answers to these questions: “Can I keep working for longer? Do I have the health? Do I have the skills, does my job let me do it? And if we don’t tackle that, then we’re just not going to achieve this.”
“And what we mean by work will have to be modified to include older people who want to work but can’t do the physical labor of a younger person, or those who want to change the kind of work they do in older age,” he said. He also pointed out that work doesn’t have to necessarily be paid work.
Age is Just a Number
Scott thinks the focus on chronological age is misleading and creates age segregation.
“In the 20th century we fixed retirement at 65 and then we saw this big increase in life expectancy before there was a sort of dialogue going on about the idea of continuing to work being appealing and how do you get to a place where you can have benefits along the way,’’ he said.
In the future, he said, the age at which one could claim Social Security benefits could be indexed to the population’s healthy life expectancy. “It doesn’t have to be an average; it could allow for inequality. Because if we’re not keeping people healthy for longer, it is not right to make them work longer,” he said.
He’d also like to see more emphasis on how now-older workers can still use a range of transferrable skills in an environment that requires less physical labor than they were formerly engaged in. Construction workers, for example, have a range of skills that could be used in other work settings that are less physical.
He also dispelled a common theory that older people working for longer creates unemployment. “As an economist, I can tell you that’s not the case. But it does change the labor market, and it does mean there’s more people competing for the same jobs, which pushes wages down and it stops career opportunities,” he said. ”So, we’ve got to find a way to redesign work so that those who want to can stay working longer.’’
Scott said perfect examples of older workers staying in jobs much later in life includes President Joseph R. Biden Jr., 81, and the presumptive Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, 77.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem,” he said, referring to age. Yet “finding ways to ensure that we are intergenerational is a key part of this longevity experience. From digital voting that may appeal to younger voters to limitations in Congress “we do need to ensure that everyone is represented and everyone is included.”
Prevention is Critical
Scott said that the U.S.’s GDP dropped by about 3% during the height of the Covid pandemic, as businesses and government offices remained shuttered or greatly reduced work hours to prevent the spread of the disease.
“The government did that to save lives. You look at that and you go wow, life expectancy and health are really important because the government is prepared to lose that much of GDP, to keep us alive along with keeping us healthy,” he said.
“And that’s how I think we should look at this healthy aging issue. How valuable is it, for us to age well, using those sorts of trade offs?” asked Scott.
He’s also been thinking about things from a personal perspective.
“In my family at the moment, there is someone with dementia and it’s a chronic disease, it’s a real problem. And we’re going have to spend a lot of money to care for that person,” he said. “But my goodness, I would spend much more to avoid them having dementia.”
“We’ve had massive innovation and intervention, which is a wonderful achievement and which is why we’re living longer. We need to keep the focus on innovation but more on prevention,’’ Scott said.
Prevention, he said, is going to be the key in equalizing life spans with health spans.
In a four-decade career in journalism, Eleanor O’Sullivan has reviewed many books on best practices for financial advisors, has written for Financial Advisor and the USA Today network, and was movie critic for the Asbury Park Press.
