Happy New Year
By Michael Hodin
In 2021, we started the ten-year countdown of the Decade of Healthy Ageing, the WHO project supported by the UN General Assembly Resolution, recognizing aging as one of the world’s most pervasive and powerful megatrends. As we celebrate 2022, the Global Coalition on Aging welcomes, applauds, and celebrates the Decade. Global aging affects every single society on the planet as each modernize, reflecting its two profound impacts: long lives to a hundred as a matter of course and the shift to more old than young.
What surprises is that, in 2022, all governments are still not running their public policy choices through the aging lens. And still only a precious few global companies have growth strategies that understand and leverage this huge megatrend. If we are inclined to develop strategies and make decisions based on other recognized trends — diversity, climate change, technology — why not aging?
Indeed, by mid-century, we will have 2 billion of us on the planet over 60, with the fastest growing group over 80. We have reached a milestone that for the history of humanity has been unimaginable: the miracle of growing old has become the norm. And this Silver Economy — estimated over $17 trillion and growing, still holds attraction mainly only for those directly in healthcare or financial services. How odd that the same corporate strategists who identify and create plans for growth into new markets — China or India because they have populations exceeding a billion, for example — do not see this age-demographic market in the same way? One observes Gen Z-focused, gender-based, or regional strategies. How about aging?
Similarly, apart from a few select cases, national governments also have not integrated the aging of their societies into their policy analysis and decision making. Yet, the trends of populations with more old than young are stunning: India has gone from roughly 7 babies per mother down to just at replacement of about 2, within roughly a two-decade span. China at 1.3 is now well below replacement, initially a function of the government’s one-child policy but now because millions of young Chinese men and women are behaving the same as all of us around the world as we and they modernize. And across all of Africa, a very diverse continent, there is a parallel plummeting from closer to 7 in the middle of the last century to just above 4 today. Japan has the oldest population as a percentage of old to young, not because of its longevity achievement well into their 80s, but because of its glaringly low birth rate at 1.2. Japan itself calls this super aging. Everything they do is because of the age megatrend, including their reading habits (where Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s The 100-Year Life is a bestseller), selling more adult than baby diapers, and restaurants staffed only by people living with Alzheimer’s, a disease near perfectly correlated with growing old. Yet, however much Japan is at the leading edge of the aging facts and follow-up actions, they are unusual.
So, where does this leave us in the matter of aging societies and our actions in the new year?
First, recognize that institutions and policies created in the middle of the 20th century are unlikely to work in today’s completely different age-demographic construct. Neither America’s Medicare, the UK’s NHS, nor Japan’s health or social security system are likely to work very well for a much older society than what existed decades ago when they were created. Is ’22 the moment our commitment to outdated policies will truly begin to change?
Second, with so many of us over 60, where health is likely to decline, we must do everything possible for the innovations that will give us a fighting chance at a healthier aging — therapies and vaccines, digital health and elder caregiving. Spending in these categories are investments in our economic and social future. From Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis, vision loss to CVD, impact on how we can deal with infectious diseases from flu and COVID to shingles and pneumococcal pneumonia, good health policy and effective health innovation are no longer optional.
Third, change the culture and how we think about getting old: everything from work and retirement, how and when we learn, to the recognition that our future is as much dependent on a 75- or 80-year old continuing to be active and engaged as for us to give our children the education and health they will need for their long lives.
Will ’22 be the pivotal year envisioned by the leaders at the WHO and UN who have given us the Decade of Healthy Ageing? Can we come together — governments, multilateral institutions, private companies and the rest of us join together — for a robust Silver Economy to fuel overall economic growth and development?
