For all kinds of reasons – immediate vs. delayed rewards, collective action problems, faulty social and political structures – we don’t prepare well for the inevitable. Our hope of adaptation and normalization creates the risk of being the frog in the boiling water (by the way, who is the cruel scientist who developed that experiment?).
While the longevity revolution isn’t as scary or devastating as a 180-mile-per-hour hurricane, it is more predictable and potentially more societally challenging. Our whole society is built on a century-old, age-segregated model of learn, earn, and burn (retire). German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the first government-supported retirement program 135 years ago with a retirement age of 70 at a time when the average longevity was 45. By 2016, the retirement age and pension was reduced to 65. And, of course, with 20 workers for every retiree in much of the 20th century, the government could afford this.
But, now with less than 3 workers for every retiree in most westernized nations and people living far longer, we will be driving off a fiscal cliff in the not-too-distant future unless we make dramatic changes to how long people work and save while also monitoring longevity trends more closely. As Stanford Economics professor John Shoven said long ago, “You can’t finance a 30-year retirement with a 40-year career.”
Maybe we have less to worry about based upon a new study published in Nature.com which argues that most of the longevity benefits of public health and medicine are behind us such that we’re seeing a slowing in the length of lives, even as there’s more focus on personal biohacking than ever before. “We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, who led the study.
He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving. Their analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.
And, yet, the famous demographer James Vaupel maintained that most children born in the 21st century would live to 100. So, which is it? All I know is that the 100-Year-Life continues to be my bible for rethinking how society should address this age of longevity.
-Chip