The Consequences of More People Living Later into Old Age

For the past week there has been an emphasis on aging in this blog--not necessarily related to the fact that I recently had a birthday! The Smithsonian article I mentioned three days ago included results from a Pew Research survey finding that most people are actually a bit cautious about wanting to live too long. We want to be healthy, but living a lot more years beyond 100 isn't necessarily the thing that most people are thinking about. 

When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2013 whether they would use technologies that allowed them to live to 120 or beyond, 56 percent said no. Two-thirds of respondents believed that radically longer life spans would strain natural resources, and that these treatments would only ever be available to the wealthy.

But if these treatments were more widely available, there would be severe economic consequences. A recent report from the Social Security Administration suggests that too many people aged 65 and older in the U.S. are too reliant on Social Security for their income.

This note examines reliance on Social Security bene ts among people aged 65 or older as mea- sured by the 2015 CPS and two other major surveys. All three surveys report that roughly half of the aged popu- lation live in households that receive at least 50 percent of total family income from Social Security and about one-quarter of the aged live in households that receive at least 90 percent of family income from Social Security.

The problem, of course, is that many people aren't saving enough for their own retirement (as I discuss periodically), but even if they are, that savings plan is based on an expected number of years lived that is well below even 122, much less something beyond that number. And why aren't we saving enough? There are many answers to this question, but a big one revolves around the fact that we live in a society whose economy is based on consumption, not production. Today's Economist Espresso has a short piece on the American economy with the following comment: "Consumers are responsible for almost 70 cents of every dollar spent in America. So when consumption grew only slowly at the start of 2017, growth sagged to 1.4%."

We consume instead of produce in part because lower wages in developing countries (especially China) have made goods cheaper than they were when we were producing them at a higher cost. That seems like a rise in our standard of living, but that is ephemeral. We can buy more, but since we're not producing like we used to, we go into debt more. This is not a sustainable model. As I discuss in the book, in the long run we need to come to grips with the fact that a planet with finite resources cannot tolerate growth forever. That might have seemed possible when we had many fewer billions of people, but it certainly is not now true. 

So, the consequences of more people living later into old age will almost certainly be economically catastrophic if we don't dramatically change our way of thinking about the economy in general. On that note, have a good weekend...

Update to "What If We Can't Possibly Live Past Age 122"

Two days ago I blogged about the possibility (a distant one, to be sure) that humans might live to be 1,000 years old. Yesterday, I blogged about a study published a few months ago in Nature suggesting that we have hit the limit of human lifespan and it is 122. Eddie Hunsinger quickly emailed me to point out that I had suggested in yesterday's blog that Jim Vaupel and Jay Olshansky both thought that the limit of human lifespan was 122, but in fact only Vaupel had made that assertion. Eddie was absolutely correct and so I am updating my thoughts here to get them in line with what the article in Retraction Watch actually said:

Jim Vaupel, a gerontologist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany and one of the authors of one of the BCAs, was one of the harshest critics. He told Retraction Watch: The “findings” stem from their naive use of inappropriate data…The balance of evidence suggests that if there is a limit, it is above 120, perhaps much above and perhaps there is not a limit at all. Whether or not there is a looming limit is an important scientific question. Because they used weak statistical methods to analyze inappropriate data, they contribute nothing useful to deeper understanding of human life expectancy and human lifespan.

Whereas:

Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois at Chicago — who both reviewed the original article and wrote a “News and Views” piece accompanying it, told Retraction Watch that the authors of the rebuttals are “missing the point:” The rebuttals are mostly focused on slightly different ways of looking at the same limited data; basically, if you tilt your head a little to the left or right and look at the same old age mortality/survival statistics for all humans, you might come to slightly different conclusions. They quibble about how to deal with the mathematics of small numbers at extreme old age, and they fail to realize the obvious, staring them right in the face: the number of people surviving to extreme old age is so small because there is a biologically based limit to life operating on our species, and what they’re quibbling about is the byproduct of the very phenomenon they think does not exist.

Olshansky's conclusion is OK if we are seeking evidence only from the past record of ages at death. But, there are two problems with that, one of which was noted by the Retraction Watch article:

Vaupel also...told Retraction Watch that maximum age at death was even the wrong statistic — instead, the authors should have been looking at the oldest person alive in a given year: In many years the maximum lifespan attained in that year is greater than the maximum age at death–because someone is still alive at an age greater than the maximum age at death. An analysis of maximum lifespans should focus on the oldest age attained over time. As the graph we cite in our note shows, maximum lifespans have tended to steadily rise over time with no looming limit in sight.

And that, of course, it exactly the point I was trying to make. If new advances in the science of aging are taking place, people are going to be staying alive longer, rather than dying. Now, to be sure, as Eddie and I discussed, the potentially dramatic changes in old age science could really alter the picture of human lifespan--or they may just make us healthier until we die at an age no older than 122. Only time will tell.

What If We Can't Possibly Live Past Age 122?

Thanks to Rebecca Clark for pointing to a "widely publicized Nature study" that I had admittedly missed last October, but which is now the subject of a lot of controversy, as summarized in Retraction Watch. In their letter (not quite a paper), the authors from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, argue that ever since Jeanne Calmest died in France in 1997 at age 122, there have been on older ages at death. Therefore, the rise in the oldest age at death (which we define as the human lifespan) appears to have leveled off, and maybe will never go above 122.

Two of the key people arguing that this is an unfounded conclusion are Jim Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demography in Germany and Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois, Chicago. Both are foremost authorities on the topic of aging and are widely cited in my text. The major point here is that new scientific ways of dealing with aging, including regenerative medicine and other approaches, as I discussed yesterday, offer at least the suggestion that the oldest age at death could be pushed to higher--maybe even a lot higher--ages. To ignore that science seems, well, unscientific...

What If We Could Live to Age 1,000?

Yes, that's what I asked, and no, this is not April Fools Day! Thanks to my long-time friend Larry Freymiller for giving me his copy of the June issue of The Smithsonian which has an article by Elmo Keep about a Silicon Valley non-profit research organization whose goal is ostensibly to stretch human lifespan to 1,000 years. Aubrey de Grey has a PhD in biology from Cambridge and his work is aimed at extending the ideas in his 1999 book "The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, in which he argued that immortality was theoretically possible. Since then, he’s been promoting his ideas from prominent platforms—the BBC, the pages of Wired, the TED stage. He delivers his message in seemingly unbroken paragraphs, stroking his dark brown wizard’s beard, which reaches below his navel. Unlike most scientists, he isn’t shy about making bold speculations. He believes, for example, that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has most likely already been born."

Mr. Keep keeps it real, however, by interviewing others who suggest that while de Grey puts that idea out there to attract funding, he probably doesn't really believe it. Keep also asks him some hard questions about the whole concept of extending human lifespan in a way that he thinks might be possible:

I ask de Grey about how the world would change—socioeconomically especially—if no one ever died. Would people still have children? If they did, how long would the planet be able to sustain billions of immortals? Wouldn’t every norm predicated on our inevitable deaths break down, including all the world’s religions? What would replace them? At what point might you decide that, actually, this is enough life? After decades? Centuries? And once you made that decision, how would you make your exit? 

“I find it frustrating that people are so fixated on the longevity side effects,” de Grey says, clearly irritated. “And they’re constantly thinking about how society would change in the context of everyone being 1,000 years old or whatever. The single thing that makes people’s lives most miserable is chronic disease, staying sick and being sick. And I’m about alleviating suffering.”

Longevity "side effects"? An interesting way to think about what would probably be the most radical change ever to occur in human society. Think about it. What would your answer be?

 

Most of Us Will Not Live to See the World's Population Stop Growing

Last week the United Nations Population Division released its latest round of World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. Although there was nothing dramatically new in here, it provides a good overview of where we stand demographically. In particular, the report itself, along with CNN's reporting of the findings, remind us of the key role that Africa is playing in the world's demographic future. If you have read my book and followed this blog, you already knew that Nigeria has been on track for quite a while to displace the U.S. as the third most populous country by the middle of this century. But Nigeria is not alone in Africa in terms of its rate of growth--it just happens to be the most populous of Africa's countries. I have copied below two of the graphs from the UNPopulation Division report. The first shows the projected trajectory of world population growth through the rest of this century.

The medium-variant projection shows the world's population approaching a point of leveling off by the year 2100--83 years from now. Since life expectancy at birth in the United States is currently lower than that for both males and females, you can appreciate that only a relatively small fraction of people currently alive in this country--and in most other countries, as well--will be alive to see the world's population stop growing, unless something dramatic happens in the meantime. What would that dramatic thing be? The second graph offers the clue:

The current age structure is very young--largely because of Africa. What the world needs now is a huge effort to rapidly reduce the birth rate in Africa.