The new old age

 Time -  Today, life expectancy in the U.S. stands at 79 years, compared with 68 in 1950. The upshot: 60 million Americans are now 65 or older—which is roughly equal to the combined populations of Spain and Portugal. A similar trend is playing out globally, with an estimated 2.1 billion people—or 1 in 5—projected to be 60 or older by 2050. Already, a third of all people in Japan are in that older age range; 60 more countries are expected to hit that ratio in the next 25 years....

“What we have is a fundamental change in the age structure of society,” says John Rowe, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Aging Center, referring to the way we’re aging—and also the way we’re creating young people, with birth rates plummeting in most countries. Globally, fertility levels have dropped below the so-called population replacement rate of just over two births per woman.

It is a sea change—and one that raises big questions about how we both individually and collectively navigate what, in a sense, is our new old age. How, for example, should we spend our extra time? Should employment still be confined to a finite number of years, or instead ebb and flow throughout an entire lifetime? And where, in a world of acute housing shortages, will everyone live?

“We have to re-engineer our society, because the fundamental institutions of our society—education and work and retirement—are not designed to support a population with the age distribution we are going to have,” says Rowe, who chaired the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging. “We need a fundamental redesign.”