Concerns about aging society ignore huge opportunities, population expert says | Aging

Concerns about the aging population are overblown and society should learn to celebrate and capitalize on its “massive cohort of healthy, active, older and creative adults”, a leading population expert has said.

While experts and advocacy groups have expressed concerns about falling fertility rates, highlighting challenges for the economy and health care, others are more optimistic, arguing that the rise of the “silver economy” brings new opportunities for growth.

Professor Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Aging, said two-thirds of the world’s countries already had fertility rates below the replacement level needed to maintain the same population size into the next generation, and that the aging of most populations was inevitable.

But she said it brings some positives. Harper said: “This is a success in that every baby born will have the opportunity – or should have the opportunity – to be highly educated, healthy and live a long, healthy life. »

While acknowledging that some people living into their 80s or 90s would become frail and need care, Harper said the main opportunity was to capitalize on improving the health and education of older people, particularly those aged 50 to 70.

She said: “There are some challenges [to an ageing population]but there are also enormous opportunities and rather than trying to resist it, stop it or deflect it, we should pursue those opportunities because we have a massive cohort of healthy, active, older, creative adults.

“And because we’re still stuck in 20th-century institutions that don’t value and don’t benefit from them, we need to create new ways of living and working that allow us to take advantage of this massive group of adults.”

Experts stressed the importance of retraining workers, flexible working and a general change in attitude towards older workers. Harper said it was also important to address inequalities in health and education so all older people could make valuable contributions.

Official figures show that the UK’s population is increasing, largely due to migration, but also due to aging, with 27% of the population expected to be 65 or over by 2072.

Although the baby boomer cohort is particularly large, creating a population explosion that will significantly increase the numbers of older age groups in coming decades, Harper said younger generations are smaller — and more similar — in size. This means that in the future the age structure of the population will look more like a skyscraper than a traditional pyramid.

Harper said: “Providing high-quality, affordable childcare is key to unlocking the potential of younger and older adults. »

Yet even Scandinavian countries, which have emphasized gender equality and positive parenting, have failed to raise their fertility rates above replacement level.

Harper said: “What we should be doing is saying there are ways to support those, particularly women, who want to have children, and that around things like good jobs, good housing, good childcare, good gender equality.

“But there will always be a group, probably growing, of women who decide that, for all kinds of reasons, they won’t have children. And in some ways we have to accept that and work with that.”

While Harper said concerns about Covid, the climate crisis and overpopulation could be factors in why some chose not to have children, she said there were other reasons as well, such as not considering having children as a necessary part of being an adult woman.

“I think it’s a very important psychological change,” she said.

Harper added that the idea that a country needed a high fertility rate was rooted in the outdated idea that you need a lot of young people to defend a country. “Actually, we don’t need more. The world has changed,” she said. “High-income countries don’t need babies. We just need to change the structure, the economic structure in particular.”

Harper said people aged 50 to 70 were an “extraordinary resource” with valuable skills for a knowledge-based economy, and many of them were willing and able to work longer.

She said: “People also know financially that if they have to retire at 60 and then live another 40 years… that’s just not sustainable with the type of pension system we have. One approach to pension reform without disadvantaging those on lower incomes, in poorer health and less educated would be to link the state pension to national insurance contributions rather than age.”

Harper said some have drawn parallels to the rise of women in the workforce.

She said: “In the ’50s and early ’60s, people were saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do if all these women come into the workforce? What are we going to do? It’s going to completely change everything.’ But of course it happened and now it is taken for granted in many countries [that] of course, women work equally with men. Well, it’s the same idea for older people.