Older Population Could Force Retirement Age to 85
By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 21 February 2006
09:09 am ET



ST. LOUIS—A person entering the workforce today in America might face a much longer career than Mom and Dad.

Life expectancy in the United States is now around 78 years. But if anti-aging therapies prove to work as well for humans as they have for worms, flies, and mice in laboratories, by the year 2050 people might routinely reach the ripe old age of 120.

That could place a tremendous burden on the economy if people continue retiring at 65 or earlier.

The retirement age might have to be boosted to 85 to prevent economic collapse, figures Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University.

Do the math

There are 285 million people in the United States, with the median age around 36. Every two people over the age of 65 depend on money garnered from the wages of 10 working people age 20 to 65.

If current trends continue, by 2050 the population will be 368 million, the median age will be 43, and there will be 3.6 people over 65 per 10 workers, Tuljapurkar explained here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Those are the conservative estimates based on data from the last 50 years, when life expectancy increased by one-fifth of a year per year in industrialized countries.

What if ...

Scientists around the globe are racing to find aging cures. Some of the work on lab animals has shown great promise. One researcher envisions therapies will be developed over the next 25 years to extend life hundreds of years. Other scientists imagine more modest gains. Gradually, however, aging is being viewed by many as something that can be largely treated.

If anti-aging therapies come into play around 2010—and no one can accurately predict if they will—Tuljapurkar estimates that the U.S. population will run to 440 million people, a median age of 47, and 6.6 persons over 65 will rely on 10 workers.

"What you would need to do is have people retire somewhere between age 75 and 85," Tuljapurkar said.

Increasing the retirement age to 75 would still yield four retired persons per 10 workers in this scenario. A better solution, Tuljapurkar said, would be to have people retire at 85.

Well, of course, it gets interesting when the anti-aging therapies get to the point of increasing life expectancy by one year per year... practical immortality! (sorry, science fiction geek moment)

If we're healthy and strong, and if we're enjoying our work, and have another 55 years to live (from 65 to 120), why not keep working?

On the other hand, those of us in the West have such huge ecological footprints that if there are more of us living longer the planet may well not support that, or it may be at the cost of the lives and standard of living of those in other parts of the wolrd (as though it's not already).

Anyway, it's intersting to think about... and until He comes to take us home, the idea of living longer with my beloved with both of us having all our mental and physical faculties is pretty attractive.

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why not keep working?

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Working, in many cases, insures health. How many that retire at 65 would make it to 100? Even with magic pills or lotions?

Exactly - 'use it or lose it' definitely applies to physical and mental faculties.

When Social Security was started, and the retirement age set at 65, few people actually lived that long. And back in those days people didn't possess the entitlement mentality they've been trained to have nowadays. Social Security wasn't created to give able-bodied persons a vacation for the rest of their lives, it was created to support those who had become too feeble to support themselves any longer. And anyone back in those who days who was able to continue to work would have been ashamed to collect money from the government, just by virtue of reaching a certain age, when they were still able to work.

There's nothing wrong with expecting people who are still able to work to do so. That would really just be restoring the system to what it was intended to be.