As 100-year lifespans become more common, the time has come for a new approach to school, work, and retirement.
By Jonathan Rauch
“The struggle chronicled in this book—the struggle to build a secure old age for all—has been in many ways successful,” James Chappel writes in Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. For most seniors, life is “immeasurably better” than it was a century ago. But he and Andrew J. Scott, the author of The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives, agree that the ’60s model of retirement needs updating in the face of new demographic, fiscal, and social realities. What comes next?
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Of course, old age as such is not new, but until quite recently, comparatively few people lived to see it. Life expectancy at birth was 18 years in the early Bronze Age, 22 in the Roman empire, and 36 in Massachusetts in 1776. It’s 77.5 years in the U.S. today, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Those averages include child mortality, which partly accounts for shorter lifespans in earlier epochs. Even excluding child mortality, though, the improvements in longevity are astounding. Since the 1880s, so-called best-practice life expectancy—how long you’ll live if you do everything right and receive good health care—has increased, on average, by two to three years every decade. By now, the average American 65-year-old can expect to live another 18.5 years. Eighty is the new 68, inasmuch as the mortality rate of 80-year-old American women in 2019 was the same as that of 68-year-old women in 1933. An American child born today has a better-than-even chance of living to age 95. The first person to live to age 150 may have already been born.
Read the full story: America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old (Atlantic)
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