Estate Living Magazine Retirement Living - Issue 40 April 2019 | Page 12

P R O P E R T Y
&
ages become less expensive, widely available and adopted by large
numbers of women.
In the future society of long-lived people, a new rhythm of social
maturity will impinge upon other aspects of family life in subtle
ways. For example, the increase in the age of parenthood will affect
the degree of parental authoritarianism, and the prevalence of one-
child families will affect the patterns of health assistance, of flows of
money in both directions, and of childcare.
The expansion of early adulthood will also likely continue. Whereas
the chronological threshold to adulthood was age 21 for the baby
boom generation, that threshold is now believed to be moving
toward age 30. This expansion of early adulthood has a number of
societal implications, including a possible mismatch of institutions
and individual timing. For example, more young adults may have
no health insurance because they are too old to be covered by their
parents’ plans but are not yet sufficiently economically secure to
have their own.
On the other hand, young adults will have more time for career
and partner searches – social and sexual interactions with potential
spouses may last a decade or more, and career experiments of
entry, exit and re-entry are possible due to less time pressure to
support a family and achieve economic independence.
The sequence of life events may also change. The traditional
sequence in the first half of the 20th century was get an education,
leave the nest, enter the labour force, marry and begin a family. With
the extended transition into adulthood, childbearing might precede
marriage, entry into the work force might precede departing the
nest, and divorce might be followed by a return to the nest.
I N V E S T M E N T
Highly skilled and educated older people, instead of being retired,
may be offered continuing professional relationships that preserve
their skill and knowledge but offer greater flexibility. A model already
exists in academia – the professor emeritus.
Long life equals lifelong learning
Education in the long-lived society will become a seamless web
in which primary and secondary education, undergraduate and
graduate training, professional schooling and apprenticeships,
internships and on-the-job training, and continuing education and
lifelong learning are a continuum. The pace of science and society
will be so rapid that those who do not adopt a lifelong strategy of
continuing education will be left behind. Universities will need to
adapt to these changes by expanding distance-learning capabilities
to better accommodate the educational demands of older people
who juggle work and study, and so cannot attend classes on campus.
We have just begun the ‘century of biology’, and eventually
some of the most profound secrets of life will be discovered,
including those that further extend the human life span. The deep
currents of change arising from ageing societies and increasing
numbers of long-lived people will continue to affect our world in
unexpected and even startling ways. By simply living our lives, we
are an inextricable part of a historical demographic stream that is
transforming our world from one consisting of mostly youth to
one consisting of an unprecedented number of older people,
some of whom will live to ages never before realised, and all of
whom will shape societies in ways never before imagined.
Restructuring of families and workplaces
As our society ages, new generational constellations will begin to
emerge, including four- and even five-generation families with new
contexts for sorting out the needs and resources of the family. With
most families consisting of two parents and a single child, extended
families will no longer have aunts, uncles and cousins. Instead, these
groups of kin will be partly replaced by the enduring presence of
long-lived older family members – great-grandparents through
great-grandchildren.
The age at which full retirement benefits start is likely to continue
to rise, to the early to mid-70s in the near term, and to the late 70s,
early 80s and beyond as life expectancy continues to increase. To
maintain the stock of human capital available to the economy and
to preserve institutional memory, strategies will need to be adopted
that keep workers in the labour force for longer periods of time.
James Carey is director of the UC Davis-based programme
on Biodemographic Determinants of Life Span, which is
funded by the National Institute on Aging. He is also an
entomology professor and author of Longevity: The Biology
and Demography of Life Span.
Adapted and updated from an article by Amy Agronis that was
published in the Spring 2004 issue of UC Davis Magazine.