Good News About Aging Boomers

An outdated image of aging is the source of the unfounded alarm about aging boomers said Richard Suzman, from the National Institute on Aging.

Andrew Ferguson takes a look at the recent US Census Bureau report called Dramatic Changes in U.S. Aging in its press release.

Older people (those over 65) in the next generation will be healthier. Twenty-five years ago, more than one of four old people suffered from a chronic physical disability. Now the figure is fewer than one of five. The proportion of old people in nursing homes has declined.

Older people are richer than before. In 1959, 35 percent lived in poverty. Now it's 10 percent. Their per capita net worth, even apart from Social Security payments, is rising.

And older people are better educated. By 2030, more than 25 percent of the senior population will have a college degree. Higher levels of education usually signify a healthier population enjoying a higher standard of living.
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The picture the Census Bureau presents is of an aging generation that will be working (and paying taxes) longer and placing fewer and less costly demands on the health care and pension systems than we expected.

Smart Whales

It's not just germs that are outwitting humans.

FISHERMEN in the Gulf of Alaska are being outwitted by sperm whales that use the sound of boat engines as an aquatic dinner bell and steal the catch as it is winched aboard.
The giant whales have worked out that the sound of the boats means the approach of a ready-caught meal, and they have learnt to wait for the telltale sounds that the engines make when the catch is being raised from the seabed.

Researchers believe that about 90 male sperm whales are taking fish from lines in the eastern part of the gulf, an area where fishermen rarely saw whales 20 years ago.

As the fishing boats approach, the whales dive shallower than usual and wait until they hear the change in engine speed as the fishermen haul in their lines. “That’s the whales’ cue,” Jan Straley, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast

Older, browner, more feminine

That there are no courses on demographics at Harvard Business School may explain why most executives are demographically dumb.

Yet you can't understand the future without demographics. Fast Company says the future is older, browner and more feminine than you might have realized in Demographics: The Population Hourglass

Maybe it's because

Demographers frequently come across like accountants--without all that sex appeal.
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Starting in the next decade, however, our flabby pyramid is quickly going to slim down. It will assume the form of an hourglass, with the largest number of older people in our society's history, the quasi-retired baby boomers, up top, and the largest generation of young people since the boomers--the millennials, or echo boomers--at the bottom. The beleaguered generation-Xers will form the "pinched waist" in the middle.
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The demographic concentration of boomers at the top of the population pyramid, backed by their vast reservoirs of disposable income, represents the next American gold rush.