On Saturday, 80-year-old Paul McCartney headlined Glastonbury, the UK’s premier live music festival. In Hyde Park, the Rolling Stones, fronted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 78, strutted their stuff. Other touring rockers included Bruce Springsteen (72), Elton John (75) and, of course, Bob Dylan (81), who is on an optimistically conceived “never ending tour.”
This refusal to fade away is not confined to wrinkly rockers. The best new book I have read recently is Leadership: Six Studies in Strategy by 99-year-old Henry Kissinger. Rupert Murdoch is back on the marriage market at 91 and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to make a political comeback at 72. These days more older people are not so much raging against the dying of the light as continuing with business as usual well into what used to be regarded as the twilight years.
Our youth-obsessed culture has always underestimated the enduring power of older people. Ray Kroc was in his 50s when he began building the McDonald’s franchise system while Colonel Harland Sanders was 62 when he franchised the formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Illustration: Mountain People
C.M. “Dad” Joiner, a legendary Texas wildcatter, did not hit the big one until he was 70, when he sank his last few dollars into a makeshift drilling rig. George Mitchell did not crack the secret of fracking — an innovation that has revolutionized the world’s energy industry — until he was in his 80s.
A study of new US firms conducted by the Kauffman Foundation discovered the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity among people aged 55 to 64 and the lowest rate among those aged 20 to 30.
This obsession is particularly silly now that 80 is the new 40 — or in McCartney’s case, 30.
Over the past 200 years, life expectancy has increased at a steady rate of more than two years every decade. There is depressing evidence that life expectancy is shrinking for poor men in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in post-industrial areas, but that is still an exception to the overall trend.
A child born in the West today has a more than 50 percent chance of living to be over 105. Queen Elizabeth, who is herself 96, sends a message of congratulation to every Briton who reaches 100. A decade ago, she had one assistant to help her with this happy task. Now she has seven.
Many people worry that a long, old age means decades of mental fog or physical frailty. What about Alzheimer’s? Or brittle bone syndrome? Yet most people are living healthier lives as well as longer ones. In the industrial era, people were worn out by heavy manual labor, hence all those ailments such as miner’s cough and housemaid’s knee. Today most of us spend our working lives sitting in front of computers, with the Urban Institute calculating that almost 50 percent of American jobs make almost no physical demands on workers whatsoever.
There are plenty of drugs to slow the passage of time or ease the pain of disintegration. Morbidity problems are being compressed into a shorter period just before the grim reaper wields his scythe. In the US, for example, the proportion of 85 to 89-year-olds who are classified as disabled fell from 22 percent to 12 percent. Diabetes, cirrhosis and arthritis are starting later in life.
The new reality of aging confronts the world with one of its greatest challenges — and one of its greatest opportunities. The challenge is that we will all be bankrupted by the ever-rising cost of pensions. The old age dependency ratio — the number of people of retirement age as a percentage of those of employment age — is set at least to double in the next few decades, with Japan leading the way and other rich countries following. In 1960 Japan had 10 workers for every pensioner. By 2050 it will have seven workers for every pensioner.
The most humane way to deal with this problem is to raise the retirement age along with life expectancy to increase the number of years that you pay into the system and reduce the number of years that you draw money out.
When Otto von Bismarck, the unifier of Germany, introduced a retirement age of 70 in 1889, the average Pomeranian peasant would be lucky to live another two years. Now, European retirees regularly live two decades beyond retirement, enjoying a life of golf, cards, hiking and theater-going. I recently went to see a production of Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mocking Bird in London’s West End and was struck by the fact that the audience consisted entirely of elderly white people.
Yet so far only a few countries, mainly in northern Europe, have embraced fiscal responsibility. Norway has raised its retirement age to 67, despite its enormous wealth, and will continue to push it upward.
However, southern European countries still think that the siesta years should start at 60. The supposedly welfare-averse US has a retirement age of 66 and, thanks to the Republicans’ opposition to raising taxes or the Democrats’ refusal to cut entitlements, a pension system that is headed toward bankruptcy.
This patchy arrangement is true of companies as well as countries. A few are rising to the challenge. Professional service firms allow older employees to work four days a week. Retailers have discovered the virtues of older workers, with Walmart Inc in the US and Asda and B&Q in the UK being particularly innovative in producing “geronto-friendly” policies such as flexible working arrangements. BMW introduced a production line staffed exclusively by older workers.
At first “the pensioner’s line” was less productive, but with a few technical changes — new chairs, comfier shoes, magnifying lenses — the difference was removed.
However, many companies remain as benighted as southern European politicians. They link seniority to salary and position then weed out workers in their 50s and 60s because they are too expensive or do not fit into the managerial grid. They allow millions of dollars of institutional experience to walk out of the door because they do not debrief exiting employees.
One of the secrets of economic growth is that rich countries have always had new sources of labor to draw on. There were agricultural workers who could be brought in from the countryside. In the 19th century, more than 90 percent of the population worked on the land. There were immigrants who could be brought in from poorer countries. This was a particular boon for the US. There were women who boosted war production in the 1940s and then flooded into the professions from the 1960s onward.
However, with all these sources already tapped (like women) or controversial (like immigrants), rich countries need to discover new sources of underutilized labor. One obvious source is less-well-off communities whose talents are still under-recognized.
Another is older workers who are being eased out of the workforce by corporate shortsightedness or who are bribed into retirement by poorly designed pension systems.
McCartney and Jagger helped to lead a youth rebellion in the 1960s that forced society to pay more attention to the creative energies of young people.
Let us hope that they can lead a senior rebellion in the 2020s that will change society’s benighted attitudes toward elderly people.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former writer at The Economist.
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