The news that the UK’s fertility rate has hit the lowest level since records began has prompted dire predictions of a “silver tsunami” of elderly people engulfing hospitals and crippling the economy. This same panic surfaces every few years: the latest trigger being the failure of the pandemic to lead to a baby boom, despite couples being thrown together more than usual. Familiarity breeds contempt, it seems, rather than babies.
The ageing of the world is one of the biggest stories of our time. Not only are we living longer, but that trend is accelerated by what I call the death of birth: plummeting birth rates in almost every country outside sub-Saharan Africa. With more adults aged 65 and over on the planet than children aged five and under, we are going to have to rethink work, welfare, and the meaning of family. For who will care for us when we are very old, if we don’t have children?
I’m pretty optimistic that we can find answers, having interviewed people in eight different countries who are redefining what it means to be 60, 70, even 80. If we continue to assume that everyone is “past it” at 60, stuck in their ways and ripe for retirement, the outlook is grim. But if we keep populations healthy, reskill people throughout life, and radically change the arc of our careers, we could usher in a renaissance. It’s notable that two of the most influential figures at the Glasgow climate summit in November—Joe Biden and David Attenborough—are members of the “silent” generation born between 1925 and 1945. That’s the generation above the baby boomers, who themselves aren’t so old any more.
There is a burning platform. China is experiencing the “4-2-1 problem” of single children having to support two parents and four grandparents. In the hope of holding this social contract together, the Chinese government has passed a law to force children to visit elderly relatives. In Japan, the population is both ageing and shrinking. At a private lunch in Tokyo a few years ago, I was startled by an economist who argued passionately that Japan must increase immigration or, he warned, “we will see our nation vanish.” The politician at the table responded, impassively, that voters would never agree. He and the other experts spoke instead of improving women’s participation, and using robots to fill labour shortages.
The following day, I discovered that Japan is already quietly providing part-time work to retired people, the oldest of whom is aged 101. Community hubs called Silver Centres were created in the 1970s, by a professor and his friends who wanted to keep busy and strengthen their links with their local area. Today, they exist throughout Japan, with older people looking after parks and historic buildings, and making products for local businesses. I visited one in May, when corporations traditionally present beautiful hand-drawn certificates to their employees who are moving jobs. A group of elderly men were painstakingly crafting these certificates using calligraphy: paid work that they were combining with a good chat. The head of that particular Silver Centre told me that his members are all in good health, which he attributed to their feeling useful and part of the community.
“We must be better at using the skills and experience of the whole population, including older workers”
These people don’t appear on the doomy graphs that economists will show you of the decline in working age populations. In Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy and the US, the proportion of people aged between 16 and 64 is now falling, which brings huge questions huge questions about how a smaller labour force will support a bigger inactive group into the future. But we make a mistake when we define “working age” as stopping at 64. Most 64-year-olds today are middle-aged. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems in Vienna, which has carried out work for the UN on “characteristic-equivalent ages.” Looking at cognitive ability and physical health, they have found that most people in Norway, Japan, Lithuania and the US are middle aged until at least 75.
As if to prove the point, one in four people in the US and UK are now “unretiring” and going back to work, sometimes years after they left the workforce. It’s the youngest and oldest workers who have been hardest hit by unemployment as a result of the pandemic, and older workers who lose their jobs are twice as likely to become long-term unemployed as younger ones. But older people are now the fastest growing segment in employment, suggesting that some employers do value experience. And a few companies have been actively recruiting older staff who reflect their customers. CVS Health, America’s largest pharmacy chain, boasts that a quarter of its staff are now over 50, a change brought about by its “Talent is Ageless” programme. “There are plenty of hyperactive 70-year-olds who can still give 25-year-old colleagues a run for their money,” says John Timpson, chair of the high-street chain Timpsons, who is himself 78. In America, an organisation called Encore.org matches retired professionals with non-profits that need their expertise, including retired doctors who want to help health centres in deprived locations.
Even before Covid, the demographic shifts were creating skills shortages which older people could fill. But now the pandemic has caused many more people to review their life circumstances, which has in turn led to an increase in career-shifting. This “Great Resignation” should provide more openings, as labour shortages bite. In the US, 19m employees have quit their jobs since April, more than twice the usual number. In the UK, new polling by the Learning and Work Institute finds that more than one in four employees (28 per cent) would consider switching jobs or careers after the pandemic, rising to 42 per cent of staff in hospitality and 36 per cent of those in retail.
The pandemic has also shown that many remote workers maintained their productivity—which should help anyone of any age who prefers to work from home. Moreover, companies are increasingly thinking about diversity and inclusion. While the main focus is on race, gender and LGBTQ+ concerns, it should eventually expand to include age and disability. As we move into the era of the five-generation workforce, companies are already having to accommodate the different perspectives of Gen Z—but those of older generations are valuable too.
Age discrimination remains rife, with employers reluctant to recruit anyone over 50, or to train them. And it’s much easier for networked professionals to continue working than it is for those with fewer qualifications. But with over one million vacancies across the UK, we need to bring more people back into work, including all the older people who are not recognised as unemployed because they’ve either given up looking or are too old to count. There are around 1.5m people officially unemployed, but a further 1.7m, many with disabilities or caring responsibilities, who are economically inactive but say they would like to work. Helping them to find flexible roles and upgrade their skills could yield enormous benefits. The UK government has already taken the first step, by creating a Lifetime Skills Guarantee. But it should look more closely at Singapore, whose response to its fast-ageing population has been to overhaul its entire education system so that it provides meaning and skills. Its Skills Future scheme gives vouchers to people, of all ages, for prescribed training courses.
To make the most of talent, we need to act well before people are on the verge of retirement. Some companies are already using the “mid-career MOT”—a conversation about career, health and finances between employer and employee. This can help people to improve their financial planning, but should also be an opportunity for them to renew their commitment to their organisation, to make it clear they are an asset rather than someone to manage out. Others are working with “women returners,” mothers who have been out of the workforce for years. This is a huge untapped resource: brilliant women who have stood at the school gate for years but then don’t know how to get back to work. We all trap ourselves when we stick to the old-fashioned career timetable, which says that we get on the fast-track in our twenties and “make it” it in our thirties—the time when many couples want to have children. Living so much longer and being active for so much longer demands that we extend the arc of our careers.
If the UK is going to transition to a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy, we must get much better at using the skills and experience of the whole population, including older workers. But we also need to “level up” health. One of the greatest drags on productivity and opportunity is the early onset of chronic diseases, such as type two diabetes and heart problems. While many over-sixties and over-seventies are what the Japanese call the “Young Old,” people living in deprived areas are more likely to suffer health problems in their fifties. Around 15m people in the UK have a long-term chronic condition. That group accounts for around half of all GP appointments and about 70 per cent of NHS expenditure. People in unskilled occupations and living in deprived areas are far more likely to suffer from these conditions than those in professional occupations who live in affluent areas. If you live in the south of England today you are likely to have eight years more of healthy life ahead than if you live in the north.
As life expectancy increases, whether those extra years are spent in good or poor health will be of crucial importance for healthcare systems and the economy. You can’t ask people to work longer if they have crippling arthritis. The good news is that there are huge benefits to be reaped by persuading people to give up smoking, be more active and eat less junk. A McKinsey Global Institute study of almost 200 countries has found that “in upper-middle- and high-income countries, the greatest health improvement could come from increased use of preventative strategies for cardiovascular disease and diabetes, including weight management, smoking cessation, and prevention and treatment of substance-use disorders and lower back pain, which includes supported behaviour change.”
For decades now, Finland, the fastest-ageing country in Europe, has been encouraging its citizens to lead healthier lifestyles. In the 1970s, Finnish men had the highest rate of heart disease in the world. That changed after attempts to tackle smoking and diet. Today, the government measures the “sustainability gap”—the long-term difference between government spending and income—and promotes health measures to narrow that gap. At a conference in Helsinki, I discovered that the second-most visited website in Finland is My Kanta, where you can see your health records, order prescriptions and monitor your wellbeing through apps that sync with your Fitbit, heart rate tracker or blood pressure monitor.
In other countries, it is often individual doctors who are pioneering “social prescribing” to prevent diseases that are avoidable. The NHS is going to hire 9,000 “social prescribers,” many based in GP surgeries who will prescribe activities like exercise and clubs, rather than a pill. In the US, I have visited a supermarket created by doctors where seriously overweight patients with type two diabetes, some of whom are in danger of having limbs amputated, are prescribed fresh food, along with cooking workshops and recipes. These programmes can work. But many clinicians are still sceptical, and budgets have a tendency to get swept back into hospitals to treat disease, rather than being used to prevent it.
The good news is that none of this is especially complicated. We know how to tackle many of these chronic diseases. We know how to recruit older workers and there is a great deal of emerging research on how to train them successfully. We also know that how we age is significantly influenced by how socially connected we feel. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the world’s longest-running studies of adult life, found that—in the words of its founder George Vaillant—happiness and good health are driven by “relationships, relationships, relationships.” Close relationships are more effective in delaying physical and mental decline than genes or class. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that having lots of friends that you can count on is a vital ingredient in ageing better.
That means changing the way we think about housing people as they get older, to stave off loneliness and strengthen community. Denmark pioneered co-housing schemes long ago, where people live together and give each other mutual support. Singapore and Finland are both trying to reduce the state costs of care by building communal housing, some of it intergenerational. A housing development called Kotisatama, in the north of Helsinki, houses around 80 older people who work together to clean and cook communal meals. Although there is evidence that Extra Care Housing in the UK can reduce the burden on the NHS and even reverse cognitive decline by bringing people together, we build considerably less of this kind of retirement housing than many countries. We need to catch up.
Is there the political will to do all of this? The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Longevity, of which I am a member, got a very positive reception from ministers last year when it called on the government to set a target for improving healthy life expectancy. Investing properly in preventative health and reskilling older workers does not have to mean losing out elsewhere: it should be mutually reinforcing. But governments can’t do everything. We all—as employers, as co-workers, as neighbours and children of elderly parents—need to change our own attitudes.
Ultimately, perhaps it’s time to retire the idea of retirement. The Okinawans, who inhabit one of the “blue zones” where people live longer and healthier lives than almost anywhere else, have no word for retirement. They do not seem to suffer the long twilight of disease that afflicts us westerners. This allows many to keep fishing, farming or caring for grandchildren until the end. They also eat a lot of vegetables and fish, walk long distances and seem to have much more supportive social structures than we do. While we can’t fully replicate their lives—and I am not advocating doing away with pensions—we can learn the lesson that we should be far more ambitious for the second half of our lives.
