If not, even the 80 to 90 year life expectancy needs to be reconsidered.
This post was written by Harry Margolis, a new contributor to the Squared Away Blog.
In their book, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (published in 2016), psychologist Lynda Gratton and economist Andrew J. Scott predict that living a century will soon become the norm and discuss the implications for time longevity in work, retirement, family life, and society.
Gratton and Scott tell us that for longevity we must abandon the idea of a three-stage life – youth and education, middle age and working, and old age and retirement. Instead, they say, we and our institutions need to be flexible, allowing us to come in and out of work, rest, retrain, and change jobs.
In our 60s, we may not be financially ready for retirement, especially if our savings need to fund the next 30 or 40 years. However, the job we trained for in twenty years may no longer exist in four decades or we may not want to do the same thing in 40 years.
Married couples may alternate between working, taking time off, or going back to school, so that both spouses have opportunities to refresh. Companies, the authors say, need to be more flexible, abandoning rigid notions of career paths in order to open up career opportunities for those with diverse experiences.
Is Living a Hundred Years Real?
Gratton and Scott predict that the longevity gains of the past century will continue into the next and that in the developed world half of the children born today will live a century or more. This seems odd considering that most life expectancy tables state that life expectancy at birth in the United States today is only 80 years for girls and 75 years for boys. So where does the next 20 to 25 years come from?
The answer, they say, is that current life expectancy estimates are, in fact, backward-looking, based on the living conditions and health care of people living today. But children born today will have a very different life experience than those born 50 or more years ago. They say that the benefits of better health care, safer cars, and less pollution are not included in the existing tables of life.
However, I doubt it. Most of the advances in longevity have come from keeping people safe and alive into their old age and not so much from extending the lives of those who are already old. Although more people are reaching their later years than a century ago, those who are not are living as long. Using forward-looking estimates and assuming normal development over time, the average life expectancy in 1950 for those aged 65 in the United States was 13.1 years for men and 16.2 years for women. By 2000 it had reached 17.3 and 20.0 years, respectively, just four years for both men and women.
By 2050, life expectancy at age 65 is expected by Social Security experts to reach about 21 years for men and 23 years for women, or 86 and 88 years, respectively. Of course, Gratton and Scott might argue that looking at the year 2050 is too close as the children born today will not reach the age of 80 until the next century – which is hard to accept. But continuing the extrapolation up to 2100, we can expect. life expectancy at age 65 to reach approximately 23 years for men and 26 for women, or 88 and 91 years.
Indeed, a new study published in Nature Aging finds that, in countries with the longest-living citizens, since 1990 the improvement in life expectancy has slowed. More people are living longer as the difference in life expectancy has decreased, but few reach 100 years of age. They concluded that “living to the age of 100 is unlikely to exceed 15% for women and 5% for men.”
Is Living A Hundred Years Only For The Lucky Few?
In addition, at least in the United States, due to the “death of despair” described by economists Case and Deaton and the death of the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy has decreased somewhat in recent years. The effects of this epidemic should soon disappear from the statistics, but the fact that life expectancy has increased in the last two decades shows the increasing inequality in the United States in finance, health and quality of life. The wealthy in the United States are doing well and their health and longevity rival that of citizens of other developed countries. Everyone else is left behind.
The result is that Gratton and Scott’s book seems to be aimed more at those in society who will reap the benefits of longevity and have the resources and ability to move in and out of work and retrain if necessary and desired. These are the same people who have the “luxury” of being able to take time off work to retrain or “follow their passion,” and consider “encore” jobs after quitting their first job. The book may speak to them and we can hope and work for everyone to have the same opportunities, but we are certainly not there now.
It is not necessary
However, I think that much of what Gratton and Scott recommend makes sense even if we are looking at a life expectancy of 80 or 90 years, rather than 100 years. Even though longevity has declined over the past century, living into your 80s is very different from living in your 60s or 70s.
As a result, we need to think differently about how we spend our lives in terms of education, work, retirement, personal relationships, and living arrangements. In fact, Gratton and Scott advocate more flexibility in all of these areas as we think about longer lives.
For example, the very concept of “retirement” did not exist 100 years ago. When the Social Security system was created in 1935, most people did not live to 65. (However, for those who live that way, life expectancy is now more than 10 years.) It may also reduce the idea of retirement with a thin line of light during our post-work lives.
But we also need to make this flexibility available to everyone. This means economic security, education, and job opportunities. If people can move in and out of work and education, as Gratton and Scott suggest, then health care will no longer be tied to work. If after retraining, older workers will seek new types of work, we need to fight ageism in the workplace. These are just two of the policy changes we need if we are to live more flexible lives and rebalance the dependency ratio between working and retired Americans.
For more from Harry Margolis, check out his Risking Old Age in America blog and podcast. He also answers consumer property planning questions on AskHarry.info. To stay updated on the Squared Away blog, join our free mailing list. You will receive one email each week.
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