Joseph F. Coughlin - The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market

E ACH OF US will grow oldif were lucky. The same can be said for nations: luck, in the form of prosperity, gives rise to older populations as surely as a good growing season leads to an ample harvest. Today, most countries around the world are about to haul in the biggest longevity crop of all time: the fruit of all the affluence, education, and technological progress that burgeoned in the second half of the 20th century.

The effect will be enormous. The aging of populations represents the most profound change that is guaranteed to come to high-income countries everywhere and most low- and middle-income ones as well. There may be other big shifts headed our wayrelated to climate change, say, or global geopolitics, or technological advancementbut their particulars are still up in the air. We can only speculate about how London will cope with sea-level rise, or Tokyo with self-driving cars. But we know exactly how global aging will unfold. We know when and where it will happen and to what degree. We know which subpopulations are likely to live long lives, and shorter lives, and how prepared they are for their future.

Because population aging will manifest in such dramatic-yet-predictable ways, when companies make long-term plans for the future, there should be nothing higher on their priorities list than preparing for an older world. Its worth planning for the unexpected, after all, but only after you prepare for the guaranteed.

With few exceptions, however, companiesand nonprofits and governmentsare not getting ready. The reason why is a mystery. In fact, from my perspective as the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AgeLab, a research organization devoted to studying the intersection of aging and business, its the mystery.

Happily, Im here to report, there is an answer. Its so simple that it almost defies belief: old age is made up.

That doesnt mean I think arthritis is imaginary or that we can will ourselves to live forever. Rather, the meaning of oldwhether youre talking about the life stage, the senior population, or even your conception of selfis what academics would call socially constructed and everyone else might call a mass delusion or a story that no one realizes is fictional. Certain bits of our current idea of old age are grounded in biology. But most of it was invented by human beings for short-term, human purposes over the past century and a half. Today, were stuck with a notion of oldness that is so utterly at odds with reality that it has become dangerous. It constrains what we can do as we age, which is deeply troubling, considering that the future of our older world will naturally hinge on the actions of the older people in it. It also distracts companies from serving the true needs of aging consumers, an already staggeringly powerful group that is growing larger, wealthier, and more demanding with every passing day.

The world is growing older for three reasons, the most obvious of which is the fact that people are simply living longer. The story of the United States resembles that of most high-income nations: the majority of American babies born in 1900 could not expect to see their 50th birthday; .

If I were teaching this information to my graduate students, some wisenheimer in the back of the room would have chimed in by now: What about childhood mortality? Its true: the biggest component of the post-1900 life expectancy bump is due to the fact that far more of us survive childhood than we did over a century ago, particularly the gauntlet of diseases that threaten kids from birth to age five. However, it would be woefully incorrect to say that all of our life expectancy gains are due to diminished child mortality. For one thing, weve also cut back on deaths for people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. A 30-year-old American man in 1900, for instance, was six times more likely to die within a year than a 30-year-old man is today, and a more likely to die within a year. As a result of things like public health measures, indoor plumbing, a lack of world wars (knock wood), modern medicine, antibiotics, safer workplaces, anda big onesafer childbirth, far more of us are reaching 65 than ever before.

And the gains dont stop there, because those who make it to 65 now get to stick around for longer. In 1900, a 65-year-old woman in the United States could expect to live to 78; .

But longer lives only account for part of why the world is growing older. A bigger factor, especially in lower-income countries, is the fact that birth rates around the world plummeted in the second half of the . (Slightly more than two children per woman are needed to keep a population stable, because not every one of those children will survive to childbearing age.)

There are two sides to the fertility coin. Heads is the tale of the incredible, shrinking, high-income nations. Once again, Japan is the standout example: it has a one-word immigration policy (No!) and a very low fertility rate.)

The flip side of the fertility coin can be seen in lower-income nations where the birth rate, though still above replacement, has plummeted to where it is from great heights. India is a good example: in 1960, the average woman gave birth to 5.9 children; as of 2014, that number stands at 2.4, a precipitous drop. Similar stories have played out in Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, .