Of all the wrenching changes humanity knows it will face in the next few decades-climate change, the rise of AI, the gene-editing revolution-none is nearly as predictable in its effects as global aging. Life expectancy in industrialized economies has gained more than 30 years since 1900, and for the first time in human history there are now more people over 65 than under 5-all thanks to a combination of increasing longevity, diminished fertility, and an aging Baby Boom cohort. We've watched these trends develop for generations; demographers can chart them decades in advance.And yet we're utterly unprepared for the consequences.We are unprepared economically, socially, institutionally, and technologically. A wide swath of employers in the US-inboth industry and government-are experiencing what has been called a retirement brain drain, as experienced workers depart crucial roles. At the same time, unemployed older workers struggle to find good jobs despite unemployment rates now at a 50-year nadir. Half of older longtime job holders, meanwhile, are pushed out of their jobs before they planned to retire. Half of Americans are financially unprepared for retirement-25% say they plan to never stop working-and state pension systems are hardly better off. Public transportation systems, to the limited extent they even exist outside of major cities, are unequal to the task of ferrying a large, older, non-driving population to where it needs to go. The US also faces a shortage of professional elder-care providers that only stands to worsen as demand increases, and in the meantime, "informal" eldercare already extracts an annual economic toll of $522 billion per year in opportunity cost-mainly from women reducing their work hours, or leaving jobs altogether, to take care of aging parents.
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